Isabella Bank Institute for Entrepreneurship

Encouraging healthy eating habits in children can be challenging, but a new observational tool helps researchers track how parents regulate their child's eating during mealtimes. CMU clinical psychology Ph.D. student Serena Piasini aims to develop a new system to address this question. Supported by a grant from the CMU Office of Research and Graduate Studies, Piasini presented her research on parent feeding practices at the Parent Child Interaction Therapy International Convention in Knoxville, Tennessee. She introduced a new tool called the Observational Measure of Positive and Negative Feeding Activity, a coding system developed in the research group of CMU faculty member Larissa Niec to assess how parents regulate their child’s eating during mealtimes. Unlike self-reports, the new tool allows researchers to observe mealtime strategies accurately, track changes over time, and introduce interventions to prevent obesity and encourage healthy eating habits. 

 A large focus of Piasini’s study was to analyze videos of children aged two to seven. She wanted to test if the new research tool could detect changes after families participated in Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) Health – an obesity prevention program developed by faculty members Larissa Niec and Sarah Domoff. Some examples of the research model include training caregivers to say, “Thank you for staying seated” to children during meals or to suggest healthy options like, “Should we have carrots or broccoli with dinner?”  

Piasini gratefully acknowledges the mentorship of Niec and Domoff who supported her project. Looking ahead, Piasini hopes that clinicians and researchers will be able to more efficiently monitor whether parents are successfully applying healthy feeding strategies they learn during treatment sessions. If future studies validate the research tool’s effectiveness, it could become a valuable tool for assessing the impact of obesity prevention programs and supporting healthier mealtime environments for children.