Early Childhood Obesity: A Developmental Perspective

Abstract

Childhood obesity is a multifactorial disease, shaped by child, familial, and societal influences; prevention efforts must begin early in childhood. Viewing the problem of childhood obesity through a developmental lens is critical to understanding the nuances of a child's interactions with food and their environment across the span of growth and development. Risk factors for childhood obesity begin prior to birth, compounding across the life course. Some significant risk factors are unmodifiable (e.g., genetics) while others are theoretically modifiable. Social inequities, however, hinder many families from easily making modifications to a range of risk factors. The objective of this review is to provide background and an overview of the literature on childhood obesity in early childhood (birth to 5 years of age) in a developmental context. Special focus is placed on unique developmental considerations, child eating behaviors, and parental feeding behaviors in infancy, toddlerhood, and preschool ages. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, Volume 3 is December 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Ecological determinants of obesity risk in Mexican infants: a scoping review

“…To date, the political sphere has not been studied during the first 2 years of life. These findings are similar to previous systematic reviews, which reported that the most studied spheres to identify risk factors for overweight and obesity are the child and family spheres 18,51 .…”

“…Some published systematic reviews have documented ecological determinants of childhood obesity 11,[15][16][17][18] . However, the results indicate that most studies have focused on preschool and school-age children from high-income countries; most have addressed only one sphere, and only some have assessed the combined impact of several spheres according to the Six-Cs model.…”

Body mass index, peer victimization, and internalizing symptoms from late childhood through early adolescence: Disaggregation of within-person and between-person effects.

“…Fourth, future study with more rigorous design is also needed by considering alternative time-invariant and time-varying confounding variables when examining associations among BMI, peer victimization, and internalizing problems. Fifth, considering early childhood adversity had negative consequences for both physical and mental health, including obesity and problem behaviors (H. Lee et al, 2014;Pesch & Lumeng, 2021;Simons & Steele, 2020), examining roles of early childhood maltreatment and poverty in the associations among BMI, peer victimization, and internalizing problems might be another important area of future research inquiry. Sixth, future studies using multi-informant methods to reduce shared-informant variance bias are also warranted.…”