Faculty Bibliography

OBJECTIVES/OBJECTIVE:We examined associations between household food insecurity status and parental feeding behavior, weight perception, and child weight status in a diverse sample of young children. METHODS:Cross-sectional analysis of 2-year old children in Greenlight, a cluster randomized trial to prevent childhood obesity. The exposure was food insecurity, defined as a positive response to a validated screen. Outcomes were parent feeding behaviors/beliefs measured by the Child Feeding Questionnaire and child weight status. T-tests and linear regression were used to assess associations between food insecurity and each outcome. We adjusted for child sex, race/ethnicity, parent education, employment, site, number of children in the home, and WIC status. RESULTS:503 households (37%) were food insecure. After adjusting for covariates, parents from insecure households reported more pressuring feeding behaviors (mean factor score 3.2 compared to food secure parents mean factor score 2.9, p=0.01) and were more worried about their child becoming overweight (mean factor score 2.3 vs 2.0; p=0.02). No differences were observed in monitoring or restrictive feeding behaviors. After adjusting for covariates, there was no difference in weight status or prevalence of overweight/obesity of children or parents based on household food insecurity status. CONCLUSIONS:Parents from food insecure households reported more pressuring feeding behaviors. This finding underscores the need to address food insecurity and potentially prevent harmful effects on child feeding. Parents in food insecure households might benefit from linkage with resources and education to develop healthier feeding behaviors.

Importance/UNASSIGNED:Children of parents expressing limited comfort with English (LCE) or limited English proficiency may be at increased risk of adverse events (harms due to medical care). No prior studies have examined, in a multicenter fashion, the association between language comfort or language proficiency and systematically, actively collected adverse events that include family safety reporting. Objective/UNASSIGNED:To examine the association between parent LCE and adverse events in a cohort of hospitalized children. Design, Setting, and Participants/UNASSIGNED:This multicenter prospective cohort study was conducted from December 2014 to January 2017, concurrent with data collection from the Patient and Family Centered I-PASS Study, a clinician-family communication and patient safety intervention study. The study included 1666 Arabic-, Chinese-, English-, and Spanish-speaking parents of general pediatric and subspecialty patients 17 years and younger in the pediatric units of 7 North American hospitals. Data were analyzed from January 2018 to May 2020. Exposures/UNASSIGNED:Language-comfort data were collected through parent self-reporting. LCE was defined as reporting any language besides English as the language in which parents were most comfortable speaking to physicians or nurses. Main Outcomes and Measures/UNASSIGNED:The primary outcome was adverse events; the secondary outcome was preventable adverse events. Adverse events were collected using a systematic 2-step methodology. First, clinician abstractors reviewed patient medical records, solicited clinician reports, hospital incident reports, and family safety interviews. Then, review and consensus classification were completed by physician pairs. To examine the association of LCE with adverse events, a multivariable logistic regression was conducted with random intercepts to adjust for clustering by site. Results/UNASSIGNED:Of 1666 parents providing language-comfort data, 1341 (80.5%) were female, and the mean (SD) age of parents was 35.4 (10.0) years. A total of 147 parents (8.8%) expressed LCE, most of whom (105 [71.4%]) preferred Spanish. Children of parents who expressed LCE had higher odds of having 1 or more adverse events compared with children whose parents expressed comfort with English (26 of 147 [17.7%] vs 146 of 1519 [9.6%]; adjusted odds ratio, 2.1; 95% CI, 1.2-3.7), after adjustment for parent race and education, complex chronic conditions, length of stay, site, and the intervention period. Similarly, children whose parents expressed LCE were more likely to experience 1 or more preventable adverse events (adjusted odds ratio, 2.3; 95% CI, 1.2-4.2). Conclusions and Relevance/UNASSIGNED:Hospitalized children of parents expressing LCE were twice as likely to experience harms due to medical care. Targeted strategies are needed to improve communication and safety for this vulnerable group of children.