Parents play an important role in childhood obesity prevention, yet interventions to curb child obesity tend to only focus on one parent, typically the mother. Family-based interventions that involve multiple family members can 
be more effective in reducing child obesity risk. It has also been shown that family members can either facilitate or mitigate the effectiveness of such programs; for example, mothers and fathers could disagree on child feeding behaviors. Despite this, surprisingly limited research has examined how fathers and mothers jointly navigate their parenting around child feeding (i.e., feeding-related coparenting). The proposed work will use qualitative methods to identify coparenting in the feeding domain. Better understanding feeding-related coparenting (e.g., how parents negotiate child feeding and meal preparation) between father-mother dyads can directly inform the development of effective family-based interventions to prevent childhood obesity.
This research is a collaboration with Dr. Cin Cin Tan and Dr. Julie Lumeng and is funded through NICHD (R03HD086430).