Precision Food Parenting: A Proposed Conceptual Model and Research Agenda

Authors

Tom Baranowski
Debbe Thompson
Sheryl O Hughes
Teresia M O'Connor

Publication Date

10-19-2021

Journal

Nutrients

DOI

10.3390/nu13103650

PMID

34684651

PMCID

PMC8538596

PubMedCentral® Posted Date

10-19-2021

PubMedCentral® Full Text Version

Post-print

Published Open-Access

yes

Keywords

Child, Eating, Feeding Behavior, Food Preferences, Humans, Parent-Child Relations, Parenting, Research, family, feeding style, food parenting practices, child dietary intake

Abstract

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 benefits for the receiving individuals. The benefits to be achieved are mostly in the distant future, but the research needs to start now. While precision pediatric nutrition will combine diverse demographic, behavioral and biological variables to specify the optimal foods a child should eat to optimize health, precision food parenting will combine diverse parent and child psychosocial and related variables to identify the optimal parenting practices to help a specific child accept and consume the precision nutrition specified foods. This paper presents a conceptual overview and hypothetical model of factors we believe are needed to operationalize precision food parenting and a proposed research agenda to better understand the many specified relationships, how they change over the age of the child, and how to operationalize them to encourage food parenting practices most likely to be effective at promoting healthy child food choices.