OBJECTIVE Relatively few investigators have explored the role of maternal control in describing the feeding behavior of nonwhite parents of preschool-age children. The present study was conducted to examine if controlling feeding behaviors (i.e., restriction and pressuring) varied by income (middle vs. low) and race/ethnicity (white vs. Hispanic), and if they were associated with the BMI of their 4-year-old offspring. METHOD Responses to the “restriction” and “pressure to eat” variables of the Child Feeding Questionnaire were compared between 51 white middle-income mothers and 49 Hispanic low-income mothers. RESULTS Mothers from both groups gave predominantly “neutral” ratings in their self-reports of feeding practices. However, relative to the Hispanic mothers, white mothers indicated significantly less restriction and pressure to eat. Higher child BMI was predicted by male gender and being Hispanic. CONCLUSION The utility of maternal feeding practices in predicting child overweight is discussed, and the significant association between the conceptually different constructs of restriction and pressure to eat is examined.

We tested the hypothesis that day-biting mosquitoes contribute to child obesity by reducing opportunities for summer outdoor play. The influence of Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) prevalence on child outdoor physical activity was compared in 2 matched urban communities, one treated for mosquito abatement and one untreated. More time was spent outdoors by children where abatement took place.

Objective Authors have recently suggested that difficult temperament in infancy may be associated with rapid weight gain, but none of the previous studies actually report associations between temperament and feeding as a response to infant distress. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether greater infant difficulty elicits more feeding, which in turn leads to more rapid weight gain in early infancy. Methods Mother-infant pairs (N=154) were visited at 3- and 6-months in their homes. Besides anthropometric measures, mothers kept a 24-hour diary of their infants’ sleep, cry, and feed patterns, and answered questions regarding feeding and infant difficultness. Results Feeding occurred as a response to nearly half (48%) of the crying intervals recorded, though it more often occurred in the absence of crying (83%). Mothers were most likely to report holding or rocking their infant as the first strategy they would employ if their baby fussed or cried. A regression analysis that included crying, feeding, weaning, sleep and infant weight revealed maternal reports of numbers of feeds per day as the only variable that predicted weight gain from 3-6 months. Conclusion Infant crying is often followed by feeding, and more frequent feeding may promote more rapid weight gain. However, feeding frequency in the first few months appears to be more a matter of maternal discretion than a yoked response to temperamental difficulty. This does not preclude the possibility that overfeeding in later infancy could be tied to temperamental difficulty and subsequently related to overweight in early childhood.

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