Authors: Jessica N Gomel Angela Zamora
Publish Date: 2007/03/09
Volume: 9, Issue: 4, Pages: 359-367
Abstract
Parent beliefs regarding food health and child feeding behaviors among Latinos have not been welldocumented A series of eight focus groups were conducted with Englishspeaking and Spanishspeaking lowincome Latina mothers of preschoolers to investigate their beliefs regarding how food and food preparation are related to their children’s health and to their own roles as mothers Systematic content analysis using NUDIST 6 revealed seven themes discussed by the focus groups Integration of these themes revealed three major areas of consideration 1 a lack of connection between the domains of eating overweight and health outcomes 2 the role of parent modeling of eating behaviors and 3 the use of feeding strategies that may not be conducive to the development of healthy eating behaviors Furthermore the data suggest that there are important distinctions among Latinos based on language preference and that a “onesizefitsall” approach to modeling Latino mothers’ feeding beliefs may not be appropriateThis research was support by a Dean’s Grant awarded to the first author from the College of Health and Human Development at California State University Fullerton Thanks to Dr Barbara J Tinsley and anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this manuscript
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