The PhD project Promoting healthy weight development through sensitive parenting of vulnerable young children – Infant Health Study – aims to investigate how the VIPP-PUF initiative affects the child’s growth and well-being, including weight development and eating behaviour.
There is a general lack of knowledge and research data on infants’ regulation of eating and weight in the first years of life.
In my PhD project, I will investigate whether the VIPP-PUF initiative will influence eating behaviour and weight development in vulnerable infants and increase the child’s potential for healthy and age-appropriate development. I hope that my PhD project will provide knowledge to community health nurses and parents, who can help prevent eating problems and unhealthy weight development.
To investigate this, all parents participating in the project will receive questionnaires when the child is around 9–10 months, 18 months and 2 years old. The families will also be offered an extraordinary home visit by the community health nurse when the child is two years old, in which the child’s development and growth will be examined.
Some children will also have their body composition examined, as we would like to learn more about whether body composition is a better measurement of growth than weight and length measurements in infants.
Families participating in the project will also be invited to participate in a project based on video recordings when the child turns two years old, in which parents record videos of the child and one parent during play and a meal. The recordings will be analysed in order to gain knowledge about infants’ behaviour and interaction with their parents in everyday circumstances, both when they play and eat.
Read more about the video project here.