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If it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a village\u00a0to care<\/a>\u00a0for children\u2019s\u00a0food needs<\/a>.<\/p>\n Children\u2019s health and\u00a0nutrition outcomes are nurtured<\/a>\u00a0directly by family caregivers, but also by a broader \u201cvillage\u201d of policymakers and governments, health and education systems, social services and civil-society groups, as well as others working at both national and local levels.<\/p>\n Lessons learned from academic research studies help today\u2019s multi-sector villages improve\u00a0health policies<\/a>, medical treatments and approaches for preventing children\u2019s food- and eating-related problems.<\/p>\n Yet, medical research studies focus more on what parents are doing wrong than they do on the social conditions and resources that families and communities need to improve kids\u2019 nutrition.<\/p>\n In\u00a0our recent paper<\/a>, we found that studies published in medical journals are stuck in a rut, repeating some outdated tropes and assumptions. The recipe to care well for school-aged children\u2019s food needs is due for a refresh.<\/p>\n We are food and nutrition researchers and dietitians who have painstakingly reviewed a breadth of food and nutrition studies, including authoring rigorous reviews about\u00a0childhood nutrition<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0family food practices<\/a>.<\/p>\n Our team<\/a>\u00a0recently combed through two leading medical research databases to find out what questions, theories and measurements health researchers commonly use to study the processes involved in caring for school-aged children\u2019s food and nutrition needs.<\/p>\n We couldn\u2019t find a term that described exactly what we were looking for, so we proposed a concept and research framework called \u201cfood care<\/a>.\u201d We described the concept of food care as \u201cthe processes of feeling concern or interest about food, or taking action to provide food necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, or protection of oneself or someone else.\u201d<\/p>\n We found lots of valuable studies about\u00a0what children eat<\/a>, risk factors for\u00a0sub-optimal diets<\/a>\u00a0and describing\u00a0how parents feed their kids<\/a>.<\/p>\n But overall, studies largely ignored the\u00a0most important elements of our food care framework<\/a>. This includes\u00a0social<\/a>\u00a0and political factors and the\u00a0emotional, cognitive and physical work<\/a>\u00a0that goes hand-in-hand with nourishing children.<\/p>\n These issues are well established in other fields of social science, but health research continues to largely overlook them.<\/p>\n Health research about children\u2019s food care largely centres on the family, including parents\u2019 food practices and\u00a0household conditions<\/a>\u00a0that shape what and how children eat. While\u00a0this field<\/a>\u00a0is progressing, when (if at all) studies about school-aged children talked about food care, children\u2019s eating and nutrition challenges were most often described as issues that stemmed from parents\u2019 shortcomings.<\/p>\n Both the food care measures themselves and the child outcomes most commonly studied were more often than not described as harmful. Three-quarters of studies we analyzed focused on how parental actions increased children\u2019s risks of feeding problems, disordered eating, excess weight or poor mental health.<\/p>\n The four main categories of food care that researchers focused on in the 20 studies analyzed included:<\/p>\n In studies where many factors were measured, research conclusions often focused squarely on things parents were doing \u201cwrong\u201d or should improve.<\/p>\n Even when the size of the effects found were very small, or little meaningful impact of parental actions were identified, research conclusions were often still tinged with parent-blaming. Fingers were pointed at parents described as doing \u201ctoo little\u201d to foster healthy dietary choices, but also at those described as overzealous and trying too hard. Parents could seldom catch a break in these studies.<\/p>\n On the flip side, researchers rarely mentioned or tried to assess how parents\u2019 food care efforts contributed to building healthy relationships, connections, trust or family traditions or bonds, psychological attachment, health benefits or mental well-being for children or other family members, or the benefits of food care for the wider community.<\/p>\n Researchers are currently working in an era in which \u201cintensive parenting\u201d is the cultural ideology and norm. Intensive mothering, as coined by sociologist\u00a0Sharon Hayes<\/a>, reflects ideas about \u201cgood\u201d mothering that are child-centred, emotionally absorbing, labour-intensive and expert-guided.<\/p>\n While health studies seldom named their own assumptions about gender roles or parenting beliefs, intensive mothering approaches seeped into the types of recommendations found across many studies.<\/p>\n These ways of thinking sometimes lay beneath assumptions and recommendations that parents should always try harder, spend more time, money and labour. Or research language presumed that parents \u2014 and particularly mothers \u2014 are, or should be, the main party responsible for children\u2019s health outcomes.<\/p>\n Such ideas also showed up in study recommendations that tended to blame parents for outcomes that may be out of their control, clinically irrelevant or benign, while overlooking the benefits of food care and the often invisible\u00a0work of feeding a family<\/a>.<\/p>\n Similar trends were called out in the field of psychology nearly 40 years ago when psychologist Paula Caplan suggested \u201cblaming mothers for their children\u2019s psychological problems has a long and, unfortunately, respected history<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Parents, as children\u2019s primary caregivers and first teachers,\u00a0do influence children\u2019s eating patterns<\/a>, behaviours and habit development. But they do so in a broad and complex social context that is influenced by political, historical and community conditions. These conditions are under-examined in discussions of family food work in medical studies.<\/p>\n Recommendations from some of these studies suggested that medical professionals should provide parents with more guidance about healthy eating and food-related parenting strategies. But authors seldom mentioned structural supports such as\u00a0policies, programs or tangible resources<\/a>\u00a0that would help parents succeed.<\/p>\n Yet parents contend with lots of conflicting factors and considerations when deciding what, when, where and how to feed their children. In many cases, it\u2019s not as simple as just following available dietary advice.<\/p>\n Evidence from medical research contributes to improved pediatric nutrition policies, programs and clinical practice. But research in leading medical journals about what and how to feed school-aged children remains largely disconnected from the\u00a0complex realities of family life<\/a>\u00a0and the political forces that shape it.<\/p>\n The sample of studies we analyzed largely overlooked measuring and talking about the important ingredients needed to provide good quality food care for children. These include\u00a0affording and accessing nutritious food<\/a>, safe food storage and preparation facilities, resources, time, childcare and available\u00a0school food<\/a>\u00a0programs, food literacy knowledge and skills, neighbourhood food environments and overarching institutional and social policies and conditions that foster food care.<\/p>\n These topics were occasionally mentioned on the fringes and have long been topics of study in some corners of\u00a0sociology<\/a>,\u00a0political science<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0food studies<\/a>\u00a0research.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s time that medical researchers and those who read and use nutrition studies take a closer look at the unnamed assumptions baked into research to make sure we\u2019re not perpetuating one-size-fits all tropes about how parents \u2014 namely mothers \u2014 can \u201cdo better\u201d while discounting the effort parents are already putting into feeding their children.<\/p>\n Health researchers can progress by more actively reflecting on their own assumptions about gender roles, good parenting, healthy eating and idealized family meals, and how these understandings are infused into scholarly work and the ways we measure and talk about how to feed children well.<\/p>\n In the 1980s, family food researcher\u00a0Marjorie DeVault<\/a>\u00a0pointed out how important it is to name and study the valuable daily work of feeding families, but there remains much work to be done.<\/p>\nFood care<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Blaming parents<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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Assumptions baked into research<\/strong><\/h4>\n
What\u2019s needed to provide quality food care<\/strong><\/h4>\n