Racial marginalization moderates associations between mothers' emotion regulation difficulties and feeding to soothe practices with young children.

PURPOSE: Early feeding practices such as feeding to soothe distress can shape children's self-regulation and eating behaviors. Maternal childhood maltreatment history and emotion regulation difficulties may contribute to greater reliance on feeding to soothe, though further evidence is needed. Furthermore, cultural differences in feeding may influence the association between emotion regulation and feeding to soothe. This study examined whether maternal trauma and emotion regulation difficulties predicted feeding to soothe and differences by racial marginalization group.

METHODS

Women (N = 181) were drawn from the Michigan Prenatal Stress Study. When children were 2.5 years, mothers reported on their history of childhood maltreatment, current feeding practices, emotion regulation difficulties, and demographics.

RESULTS

Racially marginalized women reported greater use of feeding to soothe than racially non-marginalized women. Emotion regulation difficulties and racial marginalization group predicted greater feeding to soothe use, whereas maltreatment was unrelated. Results of the interaction between emotion regulation difficulties and racial marginalization group revealed that among racially marginalized women, feeding to soothe did not significantly change based on emotion regulation difficulties. In contrast, racially non-marginalized women's use of feeding to soothe increased with increasing emotion regulation difficulties.

CONCLUSIONS

Findings highlight that the mechanisms driving feeding to soothe may not be uniform across racial marginalization groups and underscore the importance of considering social, structural, and cultural context when examining child feeding practices. Culturally responsive interventions should account for these contextual factors rather than treating all mothers as a homogeneous group, and support emotion regulation particularly among racially non-marginalized women.