Change and Continuity in Low-Income Working Mothers' Food Practices for Young Children in Response to Life Events

To understand how changes in low-income mothers' work, home, and childcare environments impact their food practices for young children.

The grounded theory, theory-guided, design included two in-depth qualitative interviews (6 to 8 months apart) with each of 19 low income, working/student mothers of Head Start children, living in a rural county in Upstate New York. Interviews covered mothers' experiences of employment, school, family, household, and childcare events over one school year and whether and how events changed child food practices. Emergent themes related to mothers' experiences of life events, with attention to influences on child food practices, were open-coded using a constant comparative approach. A life course approach and a transactional model of the stress process informed interpretation.

Within the study period, most mothers reported at least one life event, with many experiencing one or more changes in employers, job schedules, residence, household members, or childcare situation. Emergent patterns of adjustment in child food practices linked with life events were shaped by mothers' appraisals of life events, the availability of coping resources, and their adaptations to events, based on temporal, financial, and social resources. The findings support a view of child feeding informed by the transactional model of stress.

Instability in work, family, household, and childcare highlight changing contexts for child food practices in daily life. Research and practice should acknowledge the changing nature of the child feeding context and the need for children's caregivers to make adjustments in response to changing resources.