Change and Continuity in Low-Income Working Mothers' Food Practices for Young Children in Response to Life Events.

OBJECTIVE: To understand how changes in low-income mothers' work, home, and childcare environments impact their food practices for young children. METHODS: The grounded theory, theory-guided, design included two in-depth qualitative interviews (6 to 8 months apart) with each of 19 low income, working/student mothers of Head Start children, living in a rural county in Upstate New York. Interviews covered mothers' experiences of employment, school, family, household, and childcare events over one school year and whether and how events changed child food practices. Emergent themes related to mothers' experiences of life events, with attention to influences on child food practices, were open-coded using a constant comparative approach. A life course approach and a transactional model of the stress process informed interpretation. RESULTS: Within the study period, most mothers reported at least one life event, with many experiencing one or more changes in employers, job schedules, residence, household members, or childcare situation. Emergent patterns of adjustment in child food practices linked with life events were shaped by mothers' appraisals of life events, the availability of coping resources, and their adaptations to events, based on temporal, financial, and social resources. The findings support a view of child feeding informed by the transactional model of stress. CONCLUSIONS: Instability in work, family, household, and childcare highlight changing contexts for child food practices in daily life. Research and practice should acknowledge the changing nature of the child feeding context and the need for children's caregivers to make adjustments in response to changing resources.

"Doing our best to keep a routine:" How low-income mothers manage child feeding with unpredictable work and family schedules.

Significant changes in work and family conditions over the last three decades have important implications for understanding how young children are fed. The new conditions of work and family have placed pressures on families. The aim of this study was to explore the work and family pressures shaping the ways parents feed their young children on a day-to-day basis. Twenty-two purposively recruited low-income employed mothers of 3-4 year old children from a rural county Head Start program in Upstate New York reported details about the context of their children's eating episodes in a 24-h qualitative dietary recall. Participating mothers were employed and/or in school at least 20 h a week and varied in partner and household characteristics. Interview transcripts were open coded using the constant comparative method for usual ways of feeding children. A typology of three emergent child feeding routines was identified based on mothers' accounts of the recurring ways they fed their child. Mothers' feeding routines were distinguished by a combination of four recurring key strategies - planning ahead, delegating, making trade-offs, and coordinating. Work schedule predictability and other adults helped mothers maintain feeding routines. Unexpected daily events, such as working overtime or waking up late, disrupted child feeding routines and required modifications. These findings suggest that understanding how young children are fed requires recognizing the socio-ecological environments that involve working mothers' daily schedules and household conditions and the multiple ways that mothers manage food and feeding to fit environmental constraints. There is a need to look at more than just family meals to understand parents' daily strategies for feeding young children and their implications for child nutrition.

Family gym: a model to promote physical activity for families with young children.

This report describes Family Gym, a family-centered model that (1) provides free access to physical activity for low-income families in the inner city; (2) targets young children (3-8 years) and their families; (3) engages families together in physical activity; and (4) stimulates social interaction among families.

Collaborating for impact: a multilevel early childhood obesity prevention initiative.

This article presents Healthy Kids, Healthy Futures, a multilevel initiative in Boston, Massachusetts, which brings major institutions' missions and resources together to address early childhood obesity prevention. Programming is designed to facilitate healthy eating and physical activity in preschool children's home, school, and community environments by engaging parents and early childhood educators in the places where they live, learn, and play. This article describes how established interventions were implemented in a novel setting to engage the parents of children attending Head Start and staff, and presents pilot data from the first 2 years of the initiative. Healthy Kids, Healthy Futures is a feasible initiative, which has shown concrete, positive results that can be replicated.