A thematic cluster analysis of parents’ online discussions about fussy eating (Preprint)
BACKGROUND Food fussiness is common in toddlerhood. Fussiness is associated with nonresponsive parent feeding practices, such as persuasive and instrumental feeding. Such feeding practices may reinforce fussy eating behaviors and are associated with poorer dietary intake and suboptimal growth trajectories. Parent feeding practices are known to cluster; however, no previous research has examined how feeding practices cluster in parents of fussy eaters. OBJECTIVE This study explored how feeding practices and factors known to influence these clustered among parents who perceived their toddler to be a fussy eater. METHODS Data were collected from parent discussions of fussy eating on an online parenting forum on the social media site, Reddit (80,366 posts). Latent Dirichlet Allocation was used to identify discussions of fussy eating. Relevant posts (1,542) made by users who identified as a parent of a fussy eater (n=630) underwent qualitative coding and thematic analysis. RESULTS Five clusters of parents were identified, ranging in size from 53 to 189 users. These were primarily characterized by parents’ degree of concern and feeding practices: 1) High Concern, Nonresponsive; 2) Concerned, Nonresponsive; 3) Low Concern, Responsive; 4) Low Concern, Mixed Strategies; 5) Low Concern, Indulgent. Parents who used responsive practices tended to be less concerned for fussy eating, have greater trust in their child’s ability to self-regulate hunger, have longer-term feeding goals, and exhibit a greater ability for personal self-regulation. CONCLUSIONS Factors related to parent feeding practices may cluster among parents who perceive their toddler to be a fussy eater. Future research should examine these constructs to identify how they may relate to each other and to parents’ feeding practices in order to learn how they could be leveraged in parent feeding interventions.