Psychology of baby feeding

[bunnyjadwiga]

From "Experience and Children's Eating Behavior," Birch & Fisher.

Our group investigated the effects of repeated exposure to new foods on children's preferences for these foods and found that with repeated expsure, many new foods that children initially rejected were accepted (Birch & Marlin, 1982). However acceptance does not come immediately but make take 8-10 exposures and must involve tasting the food; looking at and smelling it are not sufficient to induce increased acceptance (Birch, McPhee, Shoba, Pirok, & Steinburg, 1987). Unfortunately, parents do not often appreciate that a child's initial rejection of a new food (a) is normal, (b) reflects an adaptive process, and (c) may be followed by increased acceptance of the food after the child has repeated opportunities to eat it. The commonly held view is that the child's initial rejection of a food reflects a fixed, immutable dislike for the food. As a result, the child may be viewed as finicky, and the new food may not be offered to the child again, eliminating any opportunity for the child to learn to like the food. The child's neophobia plays a central role in early food acceptance. The fact that early and repeated opportunities to eat new foods can change initial rejection to acceptance underscores the critical role of parents in selecting the array of foods offered to their children.

Our group recently investigated infants' responses to their first solid foods and whether their acceptance of new foods was enhanced with repeated exposure (Sullivan & Birch, 1994). Infants 4-6 months old were fed a novel vegetable on 10 occasions, several times each week by their mothers, and intake of the vegetable was measured before, during and after their opportunities to each the food. Infants were videotapes while eating, and adults rated the videotapes for the infants' acceptance of the foods. Over the exposure series, infants showed dramatic increases in intake of the vegetables, doubling their intake from about 30 g to about 60 g. An unanticipated result was that the results differed for formula-fed and breast-fed infants; increases in intake were most dramatic in the breast-fed infants. We hypothesize that this greater acceptance of a novel food by breast-fed infants is due to their greater experience with a variety of flavors, which pass from the maternal diet into breast milk. Recent research reveals that flavors ingested by mothers are present in breast milk and that infants respond systematically to these flavors (Mennella & Beauchamp, 1991a, 1991b). Research with animal models has shown that young animals who experience dietary variety show much more ready acceptance of novel diets than do animals whose dietary experience is limited to a single diet (Capretta, Petersik, & Stewart, 1975)."

- From Why We Eat What We Eat: The Psychology of Eating, Elizabeth D. Capaldi, ed. (Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 1996), p. 132-133