How to Define a Child Under 5 as a Picky Eater?

Abstract

Background: For most infants and young children, feeding seems to be a natural process. However, only 25% of them has normal development of all all aspects and up to 80% of children with developmental problems are reported to be concerned with feeding problems. Picky eating is one of the behaviors that children with difficulty or not to accept foods. It is relatively common among infants and children, often causing anxiety for parents and caregivers. Picky eating is often linked to nutritional problems and is also the cause that parents take their child to doctor for examination and consultation. Literature review showed that there was still no unique or gold standard for defining picky eating. This study aimed to determine the method of determining picky eater in children under 5 in Hue city. Methodology: A cross-sectional study was conducted on 772 children under 5 years old and their parents or caregivers living in Hue city, Vietnam. A questionnaire was used for interviewing parents or caregivers. Picky eating was defined according to parents or caregivers’opinion and criterion of the study. 14 questions describing 3 themes of eating activities of a child was scored based on the level of difficulties, ranged from 0 to 3 points (0 for the easiest or normal and 3 for the most difficult). Three main themes included time for each meal and eating activities of the child (5 questions), number of meals, diversity and amount of food that the child consumed per day (5 questions) and emotional or behaviors of the child at mealtime (4 questions). Cronbach’s alpha was used for testing reliability of the designed scale. Using percentiles for defining cut-off point for picky eating. SPSS 20 statistics software was used to analyze data. Results: Prevalence of picky eaters based on parents or caregivers’opinion was 43.4%. The cut-off point for defining a child as picky eater (percentiles 75th) was 11. The child should be classified to be picky eater if he get 11 points and above. Using this criterion, the prevalence of picky eating should be 25.3%. Conclusions: Picky eating is common but misclassifying of parents or caregivers might higher the prevalence. Having criteria for defining picky eating and helping parents how to use it are very essential. Key words: picky eating, define, children under 5 years old