Sheryl O Hughes

• Baylor College of Medicine

TV viewing is associated with health risks, but existing measures of TV viewing are imprecise due to relying on self-report. We developed the Family Level Assessment of Screen use in the Home (FLASH)-TV, a machine learning pipeline with state-of-the-art computer vision methods to measure children’s TV viewing. In three studies, lab pilot (n = 10),...

Background: Children from low-income and racial/ethnic minority backgrounds are more prone to insufficient physical activity and heightened sedentary behaviors. This study aims to increase moderate to vigorous physical activity and decrease sedentary behaviors among high-risk children through an inclusive and transformative sport skill development...

This systematic review with the Delphi study aimed to identify effective and resource‐efficient (optimal) strategies for recruiting schools into health promotion interventions in the United States. A literature search was conducted in PubMed, Cochrane Library, and CINAHL (EBSCO). A total of 116 interventions reported in 160 articles were included....

Researchers are increasingly using web-based technologies to deliver family-based, prevention programming. Few studies have examined the success of such approaches for families with low incomes. The purpose of this study was to describe the level of in-class and online engagement in a childhood obesity prevention program for parents with low income...

Screen use, including TV viewing, among children is associated with their physical and mental development. The most common assessment of TV viewing are self-reports and these introduce significant error. Objective measures are needed to improve research approaches to inform screen use guidelines. We present an objective approach to assess TV viewin...

Background: Little is known about how parents combine multiple physical activity (PA) parenting practices (PAPP) and their relationship with their child's activity level. This study examined patterns of PAPP and their associations with sociodemographic characteristics and children's PA. Methods: Parents of 5- to 12-year-olds (n = 618) completed the...

Although parental feeding plays an important role in child eating and weight status, high food motivation among children may also be a factor shaping how feeding impacts child weight. This study explored whether individual differences in preschool children’s food motivation interacted with mothers’ feeding styles in predicting subsequent child weig...

Background There is a strong association between increased mobile device use and worse dietary habits, worse sleep outcomes, and poor academic performance in children. Self-report or parent-proxy report of children’s screen time has been the most common method of measuring screen time, which may be imprecise or biased. Objective The objective of t...

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/173171/1/12966_2022_Article_1341.pdf

The Caregiver's Feeding Styles Questionnaire (CFSQ) is a well-established measure which uses scores along two dimensions of demandingness and responsiveness to classify low-income parents into one of four feeding style typologies (authoritative, authoritarian, indulgent, and uninvolved; Hughes, et al., 2005). The measure is widely used by researche...

Background: Family-based programs show considerable promise in preventing overweight and obesity in young children. However, dissemination is difficult because significant participant and staff involvement is required. This study examined the short-term efficacy of adding parental feeding content to a widely-used nutrition education curriculum for...

Introduction: Individual variability in weight-related outcomes from obesity intervention is widely acknowledged, yet infrequently addressed. This study takes a first step to address individual variation by determining characteristics that distinguish responsive (improvements in BMI) from unresponsive individuals. Methods: Classification regression...

Feeding styles of parents have been associated with dietary quality/intake and weight outcomes; however, much of the research to date has been cross sectional and the direction of influence unclear. This prospective longitudinal study evaluated the direction of effects between feeding styles and child appetitive traits over time in a sample of 129...

Background: Television viewing among children is associated with developmental and health outcomes, yet measurement techniques for television viewing are prone to errors, biases, or both. Objective: This study aims to develop a system to objectively and passively measure children's television viewing time. Methods: The Family Level Assessment...

While a growing body of literature looks at the associations between food parenting practices , and feeding styles, and child's weight status in developed countries, little is known for less developed countries, in general, and the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region, in particular. This study systemically reviews and synthesizes existing...

A variety of eating behaviors among children have been associated with obesity risk and are thought to broadly reflect child appetite self-regulation (ASR). While ASR is thought to occur on cognitive, emotional, motivational, biological, and behavioral levels, the inter-relatedness of ASR constructs as assessed by different methods/measures is not...

Background/objective Maintenance interventions inherently require BMI improvement to maintain. This overlooks individuals initially unresponsive to obesity interventions. Staged pediatric clinical treatment guidelines were adapted to the school setting to develop an escalated treatment option for individuals initially unresponsive. This staged rand...

The optimal approach to feeding preschool children balances expectation setting (demandingness) with responsivity to the child (responsiveness), and ideal feeding practices use environmental structuring and covert, non-directive control strategies while maintaining responsiveness. However, research has not examined the extent to which demandingness...

Objective: Use of implementation science strategies to promote fidelity in the Food, Feeding, and Your Family study. Design: Cluster randomized controlled trial with 3 conditions: control, in-class, or online, delivered in English or Spanish. Observations of 20% of classes. Setting: Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP) in 2 st...

Parents influence their child's vegetable intake through their feeding style, i.e. the emotional tone established around feeding, and vegetable parenting practices (VPPs), i.e. the specific behaviors employed to influence their child's vegetable intake. A model of precision food parenting proposes that child healthy dietary intake could be optimize...

The OBJECTIVE of this review is to understand how the relationship of parenting practices and styles, with children’s eating behaviors, physical activity, screen-time, and weight status, differ between mothers and fathers of 3-17-year-olds. The review WILL INCLUDE quantitative cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental research published in En...

Precision medicine, nutrition and behavioral interventions are attempting to move beyond the specification of therapies applied to groups, since some people benefit, some do not and some are harmed by the same therapy. Instead, precision therapies are attempting to employ diverse sets of data to individualize or tailor interventions to optimize the...

Over the last decade, longitudinal research has shown that children's general, top-down self-regulation during early childhood is negatively associated with children's weight status in elementary school. The samples in these previous studies have been primarily White, and no study to date has examined this issue in a sample of Hispanic children fro...

Little is known about how fathers' food parenting practices (FPPs) are linked with children's eating behaviors and whether these associations differ from mothers. This study examined associations between paternal and maternal FPPs and eating behaviors among children aged 5–12 years. A sample of 565 parents (53% fathers) completed: 1) the FPP item b...

Objective Assess effects of an obesity prevention program promoting eating self-regulation and healthy preferences in Hispanic preschool children. Design Randomized controlled trial with pretest, posttest, 6- and 12-month assessments. Fourteen waves, each lasting 7 weeks. Setting Families recruited from Head Start across 2 sites. Participants Tw...

Background Food parenting practices (FPP) can affect children’s eating behaviours, yet little is known about how various FPP co-occur. The primary aim was to identify profiles of FPPs use among Canadian parents. Secondary aims included examining sociodemographic correlates of FPP profiles and evaluating whether children’s eating behaviours differed...

During the early twentieth century, research on child eating targeted the type of food children ingested and the adequacy/deficiency of nutrients in their diets. Simultaneously, psychologists were studying how parents socialize their children into becoming adults. Subsequently, a multidisciplinary field emerged regarding the development of child ea...

Background The home environment is a central and modifiable influence on the development of childhood obesity. Evidence supports the central role of parents in shaping problematic child eating behaviors and excess weight. Most studies of feeding emphasize parent-driven influences without taking into account the child’s role in eating interactions....

Previous research has shown that general parenting styles, general parenting dimensions, maternal feeding styles, and maternal feeding practices all show specific relationships with the weight status of young children. This study examined the relationships between general parenting and maternal feeding styles/practices in a sample of 187 Hispanic m...

This study explored the parenting practices that parents of 5–12 year-old children report using to encourage or discourage children’s healthy eating and examined sex differences in parent’s responses. A stratified sample of 135 parents in the US and Canada completed a semi-qualitative online survey (Jan-Feb 2014) (stratified by parents’ sex, income...

Background: Maternal feeding practices and styles are well-established correlates of children's BMI z-scores in the preschool years. Most studies, however, are cross-sectional, using maternal self-reports to examine feeding. This study examined, over a 3½-year period, the relationship between observed and self-reported feeding practices/styles and...

Objective Early response to obesity intervention consistently predicts long‐term BMI reductions. However, little is known about how changes in weight at other times in an intervention may impact long‐term outcomes. This study examined the relationship between weight‐related changes that occurred early and later during an intervention and the associ...

Purpose There has been a call to improve measurement rigour and standardization of food parenting practices measures, as well as aligning the measurement of food parenting practices with the parenting literature. Drawing from an expert-informed conceptual framework assessing three key domains of food parenting practices (autonomy promotion, control...

Background Early childhood (0–3 years) is a critical period for obesity prevention, when tendencies in eating behaviors and physical activity are established. Yet, little is understood about how the environment shapes children's genetic predisposition for these behaviors during this time. The Baylor Infant Twin Study (BITS) is a two phase study, in...

Background Many tools have been developed to measure physical activity parenting practices (PAPP). Currently, there is little standardization on how PAPP constructs are operationalized for 5–12 year-old children. Given this lack of consistency our team have started the process of standardizing the measurement of PAPP by developing an item bank whic...

SYNOPSIS Objective : Maternal control and directiveness in Latina/o families often do not show the negative associations with child adjustment seen in European American samples. This study tested the self-determination hypotheses that Latina maternal involvement and structure would be positively associated with preschool children’s later self-regul...

Dietary quality is important for children's growth and development. Poor dietary quality and maternal depression are prevalent among low-income, Hispanic families. Maternal depression likely influences child feeding before and during the meal. This secondary data analysis of an observational feeding study (2007-2008) examined how maternal depressiv...

Background The majority of parents engage in 1 or more ineffective food parenting practices. Digital program delivery eliminates several barriers parents identify for attending in-person classes and may be a platform to engage larger numbers of parents if found to be as effective as in-person content delivery. Objective The purpose of the study wa...

Objective Determine if peer educators can simultaneously deliver 3 arms of a randomized control trial while maintaining curriculum fidelity. Use of Theory or Research Implementation Science principles Target Audience Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program participants (n = 540, enrolled) in Washington and Colorado; experienced peer educato...

Objectives Determine participant's 1. perspectives on parent feeding behavior content; and 2. self-reported behavior changes. Methods Food Feeding and Your Family (FFYF) randomized control trial with 3 arms, each with English and Spanish classes for parents with children 2–8 years old: Control, In-class, Online. Participants of the Expanded Food a...

Objectives The goal of this study was to investigate gender differences in the prediction of BMI z-scores in children ages 7 to 9. Predictors included well-known measures of non-eating and eating self-regulation assessed during the preschool years (ages 4 to 5). Methods Participants were part of a longitudinal study examining eating behaviors in H...

A substantial body of research suggests that efforts to prevent pediatric obesity may benefit from targeting not just what a child eats, but how they eat. Specifically, child obesity prevention should include a component that addresses reasons why children have differing abilities to start and stop eating in response to internal cues of hunger and...

Individual differences in eating behaviors have been associated with obesity among young children. Food responsiveness tends to be positively associated with childhood obesity, satiety responsiveness tends to show a negative association, and the results for emotional overeating are mixed. Previous studies in this area, however, have generally emplo...

Objective: To assess the short-term effects of an obesity prevention program promoting eating self-regulation and healthy food preferences in low-income Hispanic children. Design: Randomized controlled trial with pretest, posttest, and 6- and 12-month assessments. Setting and participants: Head Start and similar early learning institutions in...

Objective: To develop a childhood obesity prevention program, Food, Feeding and Your Family (FFYF), which encourages eating self-regulation in young children. This article describes the research methods for FFYF. Activities that will be used to guide the development of the program are illustrated in a logic model. Design: A randomized control tr...

Background: TV viewing has been associated with children's weight status and is thought to be mediated mostly through children's dietary intake. However, the mechanisms underlying this association are not understood. Objective: Assess the associations of having the TV on and the child watching TV during dinners with the dietary quality consumed...

Objective: To assess whether feeding questionnaire responses reflect observed mealtime behavior. Design: Cross-sectional associations between self-reported and observed behaviors. Setting: Participants' homes. Participants: Parents (n = 75) of toddlers (mean age = 24.7 months) in the US. Main outcome measures: Feeding behavior questionnair...

Objective To determine the feasibility of using the Automated Self-Administered 24-Hour Dietary Assessment Tool (ASA24-2016) to assess children's diets as reported by parents enrolled in the Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP). Use of Theory or Research Washington EFNEP collects adult dietary data with a facilitated group 24-hour...

Objective Parental behaviors that impede children from paying attention to their own cues of fullness can promote obesity in children. Family focused prevention programs are valuable because these programs have the ability to promote better parenting behaviors that lead to the development of better child eating patterns. Recently interest in delive...

This study focused on the relationship between low-income Latina mothers' perceptions of their preschool children's weight status and maternal feeding practices and styles, also considering the effects of actual child weight status and maternal concern about child weight. A total of 186 low-income Latina mother-child dyads participated. The vast ma...

Objective: To investigate whether food insecurity affects child body mass index (BMI) through parental feeding demandingness and/or responsiveness and dietary quality 18 months later among low-income Hispanic preschoolers. Design: Secondary analysis of data at baseline and 18 months afterward. Setting: Houston, TX. Participants: Hispanic par...

The Comprehensive Feeding Practices Questionnaire (CFPQ)is an important measure to assess parent feeding practices as it encompasses a broad range of feeding behaviors, not just behaviors negatively associated with child weight outcomes. However, parent feeding practices have been shown to differ across ethnicities and the CFPQ has not been tested...

Purpose of Review To provide scientific evidence showing links between parenting/feeding, child eating, and weight status and recommend best practices for creating a feeding environment protective against childhood obesity. Recent Findings Current research shows that authoritative styles in both feeding and general parenting contexts has been cons...

Currently, a number of questionnaires exist assessing a wide range of food parenting practices with young children. In 2016, a concept map covering three food parenting domains—coercive control, parental structure, and autonomy support—was published along with a critical review of the literature. Mapping existing food parenting questionnaires onto...

Background: Parent feeding styles have been linked to child weight status across multiple studies. However, to our knowledge, the link between feeding styles and children's dietary quality, a more proximal outcome, has not been investigated. Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine the relation between parent feeding styles and dietar...

Background: Demandingness and responsiveness are dimensions used in general parenting as well as the feeding literature to measure parent attitudes and behaviors. These dimensions can be treated as continuous variables (variable-centered) or used to form groups of parents based on scores on each dimension (person-centered). Research focusing on th...

Background: Food neophobia hinders the acceptance of healthy foods in young children, and may be overcome by repeated food exposure. Prevalent literature states that children exhibit five sensory-based exploratory behaviors (SBEBs): smelling, licking, spitting, manipulating and/or swallowing as they progress towards accepting a novel food, yet the...

Background: During the last two decades, researchers have devoted considerable attention to the role of maternal feeding behaviors, practices, and styles in the development of obesity in young children. Little is known, however, about the consistency of maternal feeding across settings and time. The purpose of this paper was to provide data on thi...

Snacking makes significant contributions to children's dietary intake but is poorly understood from a parenting perspective. This research was designed to develop and evaluate the psychometrics of a theoretically grounded, empirically-informed measure of snack parenting. The Parenting around SNAcking Questionnaire (P-SNAQ) was developed using a con...

Background: Food neophobia hinders the acceptance of healthy food in young children, and may be overcome by repeated food exposure. The prevalent literature states that children exhibit 5 sensory-based exploratory behaviors (SBEBs): smelling, licking, spitting, manipulating and / or swallowing as they progress towards accepting a novel food, yet th...

Background Parents have the potential to substantively influence their child’s physical activity. This study identified the parenting practices of US and Canadian parents to encourage or discourage their 5-12 year-old child’s physical activity and to examine differences in parenting practices by country, parental sex, age of child, and income. Meth...

Background: Vegetables are an important part of a healthy diet because they help prevent several chronic diseases. Mothers of preschoolers reported difficulty getting their young children to eat vegetables, and many did not know how to cook child-pleasing recipes. Objective: The cooking habits of mothers of preschoolers, their perceptions of rec...

Background Parents are an important influence on children’s dietary intake and eating behaviors. However, the lack of a conceptual framework and inconsistent assessment of food parenting practices limits our understanding of which food parenting practices are most influential on children. The aim of this study was to develop a food parenting practi...

Early work by Klesges et al. (1983, 1986) suggested that mothers who frequently prompt their children to eat have children at greater risk for obesity. This is consistent with the hypothesis that controlling feeding practices override children's responsiveness to their internal fullness cues, increasing the risk of overeating and obesity (e.g., Joh...

Background Parents are widely recognized as playing a central role in the development of child behaviors such as physical activity. As there is little agreement as to the dimensions of physical activity-related parenting practices that should be measured or how they should be operationalized, this study engaged experts to develop an integrated conc...

Children can influence the foods available at home, but some ways of approaching a parent may be better than others; and the best way may vary by type of parent. This study explored how parents with different parenting styles would best receive their 10 to 14 years old child asking for fruits and vegetables (FV). An online parenting style questionn...

Introduction Parents play a key role in the development of eating habits in preschool children, as they are the food “gatekeepers.” Repeated exposure to new foods can improve child food preferences and consumption. The objective of this study was to determine parent feeding strategies used to influence child acceptance of previously rejected foods...

Background: Snacking among US preschoolers has increased in recent decades, raising questions about whether snacking contributes to dietary excess. Objectives: This research aimed to characterize snacking contributions to dietary excess and to evaluate associations with appetite and weight among preschool-aged children. Methods: This study is...

Background: Maternal depressive symptoms and perceptions of child difficulty are associated with negative effects on general development and cognitive functioning in children. The study examined associations between maternal depressive symptoms, perceptions of child difficulty, and maternal feeding behaviors in a population at elevated risk for ch...

The current study examined the relationships between the specific strategies that preschool children use to regulate their emotions and childhood weight status to see if emotion regulation strategies would predict childhood weight status over and above measures of eating self-regulation. 185 4- to 5-year-old Latino children were recruited through H...

Background: Little is known about patterns in the transition from healthy weight to overweight or obesity during the elementary school years. This study examined whether there were distinct body mass index (BMI) trajectory groups among elementary school children, and predictors of trajectory group membership. Methods: This is a secondary analysi...

Parents may positively influence children’s vegetable consumption through effective vegetable parenting practices (VPP). Research has demonstrated three dimensions of effective VPP: Effective Responsiveness, Structure, and Non-Directive Control, but there is limited research investigating each separately. This study presents the modeling of Effecti...

Background: The purpose of this study was to compare the physical activity parenting practices (PAPPs) parents report using with the PAPPs incorporated in the published literature. Methods: PAPPs in the literature were identified by reviewing the content of 74 published PAPPs measures obtained from current systematic reviews supplemented with a...

Objective: To develop a scientifically based childhood obesity prevention program supporting child eating self-regulation and taste preferences. This article describes the research methods for the Strategies for Effective Eating Development program. A logic model is provided that depicts a visual presentation of the activities that will be used to...

Background Although general parenting styles and restrictive parental feeding practices have been associated with children's weight status, few studies have examined the association between feeding styles and proximal outcomes such as children's food intake, especially in multi-ethnic families with limited incomes. The purpose of this study was to...

Background: Player feedback is an important part of serious games, although there is no consensus regarding its delivery or optimal content. "Mommio" is a serious game designed to help mothers motivate their preschoolers to eat vegetables. The purpose of this study was to assess optimal format and content of player feedback for use in "Mommio." M...

Parents influence child weight through interactions that shape the development of child eating behaviors. In this study we examined the association between maternal autonomy promoting serving practices and child appetite regulation. We predicted that maternal autonomy promoting serving practices would be positively associated with child appetite re...

Research to understand how parents influence their children's dietary intake and eating behaviors has expanded in the past decades and a growing number of instruments are available to assess food parenting practices. Unfortunately, there is no consensus on how constructs should be defined or operationalized, making comparison of results across stud...

Child eating self-regulation refers to behaviors that enable children to start and stop eating in a manner consistent with maintaining energy balance. Perturbations in these behaviors, manifesting as poorer child eating self-regulation, are associated with higher child weight status. Initial research into child eating self-regulation focused on the...

Background: To combat the disproportionately higher risk of childhood obesity in Latino preschool-aged children, multilevel interventions targeting physical (in) activity are needed. These require the identification of environmental and psychosocial determinants of physical (in) activity for this ethnic group. The objectives were to examine differ...

Objectives: Despite the high prevalence rates of food insecurity and obesity among children of Hispanic immigrants, there has been a dearth of research on the direct relationship between food insecurity and obesity among this population. Further, prior research examining the association between food insecurity and body composition among children of...

US children are at risk for developing childhood obesity. Currently, 23 % of children ages 2–5 are overweight or obese, i.e., at or above the 85th percentile. This prevalence becomes even higher as children age, with 34 % of children ages 6–11 being overweight or obese. Ethnic minority children are at a higher risk for overweight/obesity with 46 %...

Although research shows that "food parenting practices" can impact children's diet and eating habits, current understanding of the impact of specific practices has been limited by inconsistencies in terminology and definitions. This article represents a critical appraisal of food parenting practices, including clear terminology and definitions, by...

Objective . The aim was to investigate the influence of feeding styles and food parenting practices on low-income children’s weight status over time. Method . Participants were 129 Latina parents and their Head Start children participating in a longitudinal study. Children were assessed at baseline (4 to 5 years old) and again eighteen months later...

Objective: Habit has been defined as the automatic performance of a usual behaviour. The present paper reports the relationships of variables from a Model of Goal Directed Behavior to four scales in regard to parents' habits when feeding their children: habit of (i) actively involving child in selection of vegetables; (ii) maintaining a positive v...

Despite a growing consensus on the feeding practices associated with healthy eating patterns, few observational studies of maternal feeding practices with young children have been conducted, especially in low-income populations. The aim of this study was to provide such data on a low income sample to determine the degree to which observed maternal...

Background: Parent feeding has been associated with child overweight/obesity in low-income families. Because acculturation to the United States has been associated with increased adult obesity, our study aim was to determine whether acculturation was associated with feeding in these populations. Methods: Low-income Hispanic mothers of preschoole...