Comportamento das mães e percepção materna sobre a alimentação dos filhos

Abstract

The family carries a major responsibility for nutrition during childhood – especially the mother – through the provision of food and shaping the child's nutritional behavior, in addition to serving as models for food choices and the formation of habits and behavior. Objectives: Assess the behavior of mothers during mealtimes with their children, as well as maternal perceptions regarding their children's food intake. Methods: a non-probabilistic sample of mothers and their respective children (boys and girls from ages 6 to 10), who go to Basic Health Units from the City of São Paulo and were invited to respond to a Parent Mealtime Action Scale (PMAS) and the Children’s Dietary Questionnaire (CDQ). The age, income, education and nutritional status of mothers and their children were assessed and the associations between these characteristics and the PMAS and CDQ scores were examined using linear regression. The correlations between PMAS and CDQ were analyzed by the Spearman test and the nutritional status correlations between mothers and their children, by the Pearson's chi-square. Results: The study participants included 116 pairs of mothers and children (most from ages 8 to 10, with 54.3% boys); 71.5% of the mothers and 57.7% of the children were either overweight or obese. The most common positive maternal attitudes according to the responses from the PMAS were: daily offer of fruits and vegetables, limits on sweets, and positive persuasion. The negative attitudes were sweet-eating role model, use of rewards and providing many food options. Among the CDQ factors, the most frequent ones among mothers were perceived responsibility toward their children's food intake, monitoring by mothers of healthy food consumption, junk food restrictions, and exerting pressure to eat. The least common ones were the mother's awareness of the child's weight, the mother’s perception of her own weight, and the mother’s concern with the weight of her child. The influence of the mother's nutritional status, as well as her children's, could be noted in the responses to some of these factors. There was a moderate correlation (r= 0.4347; p < 0.0001) between the nutritional status of the mother and child, and weak correlations between the PMAS domains and the CDQ factors. Conclusion: the scales used assess similar constructs, but in a different and complementary way, showing that the attitudes and perceptions of mothers regarding their children's nutrition vary according to their own nutritional status, as well as the child's. Most of the responses reflected positive attitudes and behaviors, but there were indications that specific work needs to be done with these mothers concerning which attitudes and behaviors will truly have positive effects on their children's eating habits.