Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

845

Date

2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Public Health

Major

Public Health

Concentration

Epidemiology

Committee Chair

Fawaz Mzayek

Committee Member

Satish Kedia

Committee Member

George Relyea

Abstract

Feeding practices during infancy and early childhood have lifelong effects on weight and relationships with food. With the growing prevalence of obesity in adults and children, early feeding practices are being examined more carefully as points in which public health interventions may be successful. Experts recommend that feeding practices be responsive in nature. Maternal depression has been shown to have deleterious effects on parenting practices, contributing to their unresponsiveness. As the responsive frameworks for parenting and feeding are similar, we expected to find similar effects of maternal depression on feeding practices. Maternal depression does, in fact, contribute to unresponsive feeding practices in our models. This study gives us a starting point to further explore the relationships of maternal depression and responsive feeding practices, in order to find interventions aimed at increasing the responsiveness of feeding practices in early childhood.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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