Eating behaviour and its variability in 1-year-old children

As part of a longitudinal study of the development of eating behaviour, the naturally occurring meals of 30 12 month old children were videotaped on four occasions, all in their own homes. Their mealtime behaviour was coded using a scheme developed for the analysis of feeding behaviour over the weaning period, and summarised as counts of coded actions. Thirty of these meals were coded independently by a second observer. With one exception, the reliability of the counts was high (r> 0·9). The median duration of the meals was 17 min (range 1–50) and the median number of times the mother directly gave the child food was 42 (0–172). The median number of food refusals by the child was 11 (0–89), and self feeding actions, 12 (0–101). Counts of eating behaviour for the main and sweet courses during the same meal were only modestly correlated. Between subject variance for different behaviour counts comprised 41% to 54% of the total variance. These results show that 1 year old children are relatively variable in their eating behaviour from meal to meal, so measures taken from a single meal will not reliably summarise childrenʹs feeding characteristics. Food refusal is a common feature of eating behaviour in normal children at this age.