What Parents Really Think About Their Feeding Practices and Behaviors: Lessons Learned from the Development of a Parental Feeding Assessment Tool

Interest in the role that parenting assumes in child obesity has increased the need for valid and reliable screening tools that are specific for populations targeted by programming efforts. While low-income families comprise a large audience for Cooperative Extension obesity prevention programs, valid and reliable selfadministered parenting assessments for this population are lacking. Development of such tools requires understanding low-income parents’ interpretations of questions related to their parenting. The current paper reports on interviews conducted with low-income parents (N = 44) of 3- to 5-year-old children during the development of a tool to assess parenting in the context of feeding. Interviews revealed areas of potential discrepancy between parents’ and researchers’ interpretations of items that may affect parents’ responses and subsequent measurement validity when used in Cooperative Extension community intervention setting. Three themes emerged that may interfere with valid and reliable assessments of constructs: fear of being labeled a “harsh parent,” response bias due to previous knowledge, and discrepancy in interpretation of the intended construct. Results highlight complexities of constructing parent-report assessments of parenting for low-income audiences, and potential hazards of using research-focused tools with high respondent burden. Guidelines for educators assessing parents’ feeding behaviors are presented

Early Parental Positive Behavior Support and Childhood Adjustment: Addressing Enduring Questions with New Methods

A large literature provides strong empirical support for the influence of parenting on child outcomes. The current study addresses enduring research questions testing the importance of early parenting behavior to children's adjustment. Specifically, we developed and tested a novel multi‐method observational measure of parental positive behavior support at age 2. Next, we tested whether early parental positive behavior support was related to child adjustment at school age, within a multi‐agent and multi‐method measurement approach and design. Observational and parent‐reported data from mother–child dyads (N = 731; 49 percent female) were collected from a high‐risk sample at age 2. Follow‐up data were collected via teacher report and child assessment at age 7.5. The results supported combining three different observational methods to assess positive behavior support at age 2 within a latent factor. Further, parents' observed positive behavior support at age 2 predicted multiple types of teacher‐reported and child‐assessed problem behavior and competencies at 7.5 years old. Results supported the validity and predictive capability of a multi‐method observational measure of parenting and the importance of a continued focus on the early years within preventive interventions.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110827/1/sode12103.pd

The Forgotten Half of Program Evaluation: A Focus on the Translation of Rating Scales for Use with Hispanic Populations

tools have been developed and validated with English-speaking samples. There is little research and practical guidance on the cultural adaptation and translation of rating scales. The purpose of this article is to summarize the methodological work in this area as it relates to evaluation in Extension, specifically with Spanish-speaking, Hispanic populations of Mexican origin. General practices are reviewed and recommendations outlined. Inferences about program outcomes and impacts depend, in large part, on the rating scale; therefore, inattention to these issues could lead to misleading results and interpretations

Neural Response to Reward in Young Men with Cannabis Use Disorders

Cannabis is one of the most widely used drugs, especially among adolescents. While studies with adults have indicated that cannabis use disorders influence reward-related brain function by attenuating responding in the striatum, little is known about neural response to reward in younger cannabis users, who are still undergoing brain development and who have initiated use relatively recently. We tested the hypothesis that cannabis use disorders would be associated with altered response to monetary reward. Young men (M age= 20 years; 55% European American, 45% African American) with current or recent cannabis abuse or dependence (n=12) or with no history of psychiatric disorders (n=39) participated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging study using a guessing task that includes anticipation and receipt of monetary reward. Factorial models examined group and condition effects on neural response in two regions in reward circuitry: the ventral striatum and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC).\ud Young men with cannabis use disorders exhibited greater response to reward anticipation in the putamen and in BA32 than did comparison men (105 voxels, t= 4.73, pFWE <0.05, Talairach coordinates: -15, 4, 4; 400 voxels, t= 5.28, pFWE <0.05; -8, 20, 32, respectively). Additional analyses will consider frequency, quantity, and onset of use. These results indicate that in young adults, cannabis use disorders may be associated with greater neural responding in reward-related brain areas rather than decreased responding. Accordingly, these findings raise questions about the influence of development and cannabis exposure in reward function

The long-term effectiveness of the Family Check-Up on school-age conduct problems: Moderation by neighborhood deprivation.

Several studies suggest that neighborhood deprivation is a unique risk factor in child and adolescent development of problem behavior. We sought to examine whether previously established intervention effects of the Family Check-Up (FCU) on child conduct problems at age 7.5 would persist through age 9.5, and whether neighborhood deprivation would moderate these effects. In addition, we examined whether improvements in parent-child interaction during early childhood associated with the FCU would be related to later reductions in child aggression among families living in the highest risk neighborhoods. Using a multisite cohort of at-risk children identified on the basis of family, child, and socioeconomic risk and randomly assigned to the FCU, intervention effects were found to be moderated by neighborhood deprivation, such that they were only directly present for those living at moderate versus extreme levels of neighborhood deprivation. In addition, improvements in child aggression were evident for children living in extreme neighborhood deprivation when parents improved the quality of their parent-child interaction during the toddler period (i.e., moderated mediation). Implications of the findings are discussed in relation to the possibilities and possible limitations in prevention of early problem behavior for those children living in extreme and moderate levels of poverty

Early Childhood Predictors of Severe Youth Violence in Low‐Income Male Adolescents

Using a cohort of 310 low-income male adolescents living in an urban community and followed prospectively from 18&nbsp;months through adolescence (ages 15-18&nbsp;years), the current study examined whether individual, family, and community risk factors from ages 18 to 42&nbsp;months were associated with adolescents' violent behavior, as indexed by juvenile petitions. Results of multivariate analyses indicated that although family income was the only factor to discriminate those with no arrest record from those with nonviolent arrests, rejecting parenting, child oppositional behavior, emotion regulation, and minority status during the toddler period contributed unique variance in distinguishing male adolescents arrested for violent behavior compared to those never arrested and those arrested for nonviolent behavior. Implications for prevention efforts are discussed