“The Kale Is Green” and Other Things Caregivers Say when Feeding Infants and Toddlers Are Associated with Child Rate of Acceptance

Responsive feeding is important for helping children to develop healthy eating behaviors. Verbal feeding interactions between caregivers and children may reflect caregiver’s responsiveness and contribute to children’s developing lexical networks related to food and eating. This project aimed to: 1) characterize what caregivers say to infants and toddlers during a single feeding session and 2) test the associations between caregiver’s verbal prompts and food acceptance by children. Filmed interactions of caregivers and their infants (N = 46 infants aged 6–11 mo) and toddlers (N = 60 toddlers aged 12–24 mo) were coded and analyzed to explore the following: 1) what caregivers said during a single feeding session and 2) whether caregiver’s verbalizations were associated with child food acceptance. Caregiver verbal prompts were coded during each food offer and summed across the feeding session; prompts were categorized as supportive, engaging, and unsupportive. Outcomes included accepted tastes, rejected tastes, and rate of acceptance. Mann–Whitney’s U tests and Spearman’s correlations tested bivariate associations. Multilevel ordered logistic regression tested associations between verbal prompt categories and the rate of acceptance across offers. Verbal prompts were largely supportive (41%) and engaging (46%), and caregivers of toddlers used significantly more verbal prompts than caregivers of infants (mean ± SD: 34.5 ± 16.9 compared with 25.2 ± 11.6; P = 0.006). Among toddlers, more engaging and unsupportive prompts were associated with a lower rate of acceptance (ρ = −0.30, P = 0.02; ρ = −0.37, P = 0.004). For all children, multilevel analyses revealed that more unsupportive verbal prompts were associated with a lower rate of acceptance (b = −1.52; SE = 0.62; P = 0.01) and individual caregiver use of more engaging and unsupportive prompts than usual was associated with a lower rate of acceptance (b = −0.33; SE = 0.08; P < 0.001: b = −0.58; SE = 0.11; P < 0.001). These findings suggest that caregivers may strive for a supportive and engaging emotional setting during feeding, although verbalization category may change as children exhibit more rejection. Furthermore, what caregivers say may change as children develop more advanced language capabilities.