High food motivation among children is trait-like and increases risks of unhealthy dietary intake and obesity. Scientific knowledge of how parenting can best support healthy eating habits and growth among children who are predisposed to overeating is surprisingly limited. This investigation will identify supportive food parenting approaches for obesity prevention that address the needs of highly food motivated children.

High levels of food motivation among young children are heritable, track over time, and associated with elevated risks of unhealthy eating and obesity. Despite significant growth of family-based obesity prevention efforts, the evidence base is remarkably scant on parenting highly food motivated children to prevent obesity and poor dietary outcomes. The goal of this investigation is to generate a robust basic science evidence for parenting highly food motivated children to prevent excessive dietary intakes and body mass index (BMI) gains during the preschool years. Using a prospective cohort design, this investigation follow 205 caregiver/child dyads over 18 months as children transition from preschool to elementary school, when significant numbers of children begin to experience problems of poor diet quality and obesity. Children with varying food motivation will be recruited to understand whether highly food motivated children have different needs than other children. A multi-method approach will use state-of-the-art measures, including ecological momentary assessment, to comprehensively investigate the amount, types, and consistency of food parenting practices (i.e., specific, goal-oriented behaviors) needed to prevent food motivated behaviors, excessive dietary intake, and BMI gains in children. Specifically, the role of structure (i.e., theoretically supportive) and its differentiation from more coercive types of food parenting control will be comprehensively characterized.

Inclusion Criteria:

1. Child ages 4 or 5 years at baseline;
2. Parent/ primary caregiver with legal representation (having 50% or more custody of child);
3. Parent/primary caregiver reporting primary responsibility for child feeding outside of childcare (being with child when they are eating at least two times daily);
4. Caregiver with a cell phone that can be used to send and receive text messages. If there is more than one age-eligible child in the family, we will ask the caregiver to pick the index child.

Exclusion Criteria:

1. Parent/primary caregiver <18 years of age;
2. Child history of major food allergies (e.g., peanuts);
3. Child medication use (e.g., insulin), developmental disability (e.g., autism) or medical condition(s) (e.g., diabetes) known to affect food intake and growth;
4. Foster child.

Research data generated by the project will be supported by TUScholarShare (https://scholarshare.temple.edu/), the institutional repository for Temple University. This is a repository service that is managed by the Temple University Libraries and uses Open Repository, an enhanced DSpace platform that is hosted by Atmire. TUScholarShare has been developed with the intent of helping researchers comply with grant-funding agency requirements. It enables dissemination and long-term preservation and curation (management, use, and re-use) of data.

Within two years of completion of the study

Researchers will work with the University Libraries Research Data Management Services staff to facilitate the deposit of data into TUScholarShare, and to ensure appropriate metadata and complete documentation of the data to maximize the ability to understand and reuse the data. The data will be published in TUScholarShare for long-term preservation, using services such as file format migration where possible, persistent identifiers (DOIs), persistent Web addresses (handles), and checksums.

TUScholarShare data resides in two locations, a local Isilon storage system and an off-site cloud-based service, Open Repository. Open Repository's AWS cloud storage service provides extended infrastructure, which includes a production server, test server, fallback servers, data backups, and full system backups