Interventions for positive parental feeding practices in low-income households: a scoping review

Parental feeding practices play a critical role in shaping children's dietary behaviours and self-regulation during early childhood. These practices are particularly important in low-income households, where structural constraints, including household food insecurity (HFI), may influence how feeding guidance is implemented and sustained. Although a growing number of interventions aim to promote positive parental feeding practices, there remains limited synthesis of how contemporary programmes are conceptualised, designed, and delivered within low-income contexts, including the extent to which feeding-related components, implementation strategies, and contextual factors such as HFI are addressed.

A comprehensive literature search was conducted across PubMed, CINAHL, and EMBASE using predefined search terms. The study selection followed the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology for scoping reviews and the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. Eligible studies included intervention programmes targeting parental feeding practices among low-income families with young children.

Sixteen articles representing fifteen unique interventions published between 2015 and 2025 were included. The parenting-focused domain was the most common, followed by digital, multicomponent, and home-based nutrition education and skill-building domains. Across interventions, responsive feeding emerged as the most consistently targeted and improved construct, regardless of delivery mode or setting. Interventions incorporating active skill-building strategies such as coaching, modelling, and guided practice were more consistently associated with changes in parental feeding behaviours than those relying primarily on information provision. Explicit integration of HFI into the intervention design was limited; only a small number of interventions (n = 3) measured or directly addressed food insecurity, while others (n = 2) addressed related constraints implicitly through food provision, stress reduction, or improvements in home food availability. The effects on child anthropometric outcomes were generally limited and inconsistent.

Contemporary feeding interventions in low-income households demonstrate substantial conceptual convergence around responsive feeding yet vary widely in implementation strategies and attention to structural context. Findings suggest that feeding practices, meal structure, and the home food environment may represent more appropriate intermediate indicators of intervention success than anthropometric outcomes in early childhood. Future interventions should prioritise theory-driven, skill-based designs and more explicitly integrate household food insecurity and related contextual constraints to enhance relevance, equity, and sustainability.

Open Science Framework (OSF), January 12, 2026 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/RHSBF .