Mothers’ sensitivity enhancement and its effect on infants' food habits. A RCT study in a rural colombian altoandino context”

The main goal of the current study is to analyze if a positive parenting program (Video Intervention to Promote Positive parenting and sensitivity discipline, VIPP-SD), would affect mothers´ sensitivity and food habits concerning their preschool children in a rural area, namely Soracá (Boyacá) in Colombia. In order to accomplish this main aim a RCT study was conducted by confronting two groups of mothers with their children (Experimental group N = 12 and Control group N =12) the first group (VIPP intervention group) got both the parenting intervention and the food habits intervention, while the second group got only the food habits intervention as intervention as usual (Control). Variables under consideration are: socioeconomic status, parental discipline style, mother´s sensitivity and food habits in relation to knowledge, attitudes and practices. The first part (Chapter 2) provided information of the general method section for study 1 and 2 and some preliminary descriptive results. The research has been implemented by two studies: STUDY 1 (Chapter 2) focused on the description of the study variables and the equality of means of the VIPP groups and control. The main objective of the study was to explore the relationship between maternal sensitivity, parental discipline strategies and food habits in a sample of rural mothers with their children aged 16-36 months in a context rural. In particular, the main objective was to determine that there were no significant mean differences between the VIPP intervention group and the Control group and how each of these variables was related to each other. The analysis of the relationships between groups allowed us to find that there was no significant difference between the VIPP and Control groups before starting the intervention. STUDY 2 (Chapter 3) consisted of analyzing the expected changes in the mothers' outcomes from the pre-intervention (T1) to the post-intervention (T2) in the two groups. taking into account the aforementioned outocome variables. The main objective of the study was to compare the group 1 of mothers with their children (that is, the mothers who received both the VIPP-SD intervention and the socio-educational program on eating habits) would increase more -from T1 to T2- their eating habits, sensitivity and ability in the disciplinary strategies of parents, regardless of the sex and age of their children Specifically, the present study evaluated the effect of the intervention with VIPP-SD combined with a socio-educational feeding program, with rural mothers through a RCT, in order to compare the two groups after the completion of VIPP intervention with an ANOVA and ANCOVA 2x2. The results of this study provided evidence to support the growing body of literature on the effectiveness of VIPP-SD to increase maternal sensitivity and contribute to furthering the research in rural low SES contexts by considering two aspects innovatively investigated in the effect of mother sensitivity in enhancing food habits in the maternal behaviors toward the children.