Cranky baby? Feeding may not be the right answer
Feeding a hungry baby can seem like one of the most basic tasks of parent hood, but right from the beginning, the way an individual baby eats, gains weight and grows is a complicated parent-child mix of behavior and biology.
Part of the equation is whether the baby is actually hungry, or whether parents are providing food at any sign of distress. Dr. Ian Paul, a professor of pediatrics and public health sciences at Penn State College of one of the leaders of the Insight Study, an intervention that started in 2011 to look at the effects of helping parents learn “responsive parenting” strategies that help them read their babies’ signals .“Many people tellfeed on demand, but they never define what‘ on demand’ is, ”he said.
In the intervention, he said, parents learn to recognize what is actually hunger, since hungry babies, of course, need to be fed, and they also learn alternative strategies for soothing babies who are crying for other reasons.
A new study just showed that more than 10 percent of the world’ s population is obese, with major public health and medical consequences. Among the many factors to consider is the science of how individual people eat and gain weight, right from the beginning.
Different babies may make different demand son their parents.“A lot of my research is on what is the infant is bringing to the table ,” said Dr. Julie L um eng, a professor of pediatric sat the University of Michigan. She emphasizedthat obesity is not well understood by scientists; many researchers believed that childhood obesity could be prevented by breast-feeding, or by changingstrategies for introducing solid foods, but that has not been borne out in studies.
She hailed the responsive parenting intervention as a well conducted trialthat shed important light on feeding dynamics in early life, but argued for more research on the baby side of the equation .“Babies are born with different temperaments, and I don’ t think it’ s crazy to say that some babies are voracious eaters and some are not and they require different kinds of parenting ,” she said.
The Gemini study in Britain, which has been tracking 2,400 set soft wins born in Britain in 2007, offers useful insight son differences in appetite. The study design allows researchers to compare identical twins, who have the same genetic makeup, with non identical twins, who are more different genetically, but grow up in the same family environment at the same time.
“We were actually quite surprised by how much variationthere was in appetite ,” said Dr. Clare Llewellyn, a lecturer in behavioral obesity research at University College London whole ads the study .“We found that differences between babies in their appetite have a really important genetic component to them.”