A brief group intervention for young children with feeding problems

A brief, yet comprehensive group feeding intervention is described involving parents and children under 5 attending four weekly group sessions followed by 1 month follow-up. Families were referred by community-based professionals for a range of feeding difficulties, however, they were not known to local child and adolescent health mental health services. These families were from Tower Hamlets in the East End of London and considered ;hard to reach'. Having not previously accessed mainstream services, an outreach-based approach was required. The group involves a focused and structured approach using educational, psychological and behavioural techniques. In addition, weekly food tasks allowed important observation of parental and child behaviours in relation to food. Interventions and challenges were developed on the basis of parent reports and often contrasting observations during food tasks. A feeding questionnaire has been used to evaluate the four groups completed to date. A single case study is presented here with reference to outcome measures. This is an evolving project showing good initial results on the basis of individual measures and parental reports.