A systematic review of mealtime training for caregivers: effectiveness and social validity

Common problems faced by families and caregivers of children exhibiting mealtime challenges include food refusal, food selectivity, and/or challenging behaviors. To fully address a mealtime challenge, the inclusion of families and caregivers is essential to ensure the generalization of appropriate mealtime behaviors (e.g., acceptance of foods) to actual familial mealtimes. This literature review includes 49 articles that implemented a training procedure to teach behavioral mealtime interventions to parents or caregivers. The researchers analyzed the effectiveness of the interventions across several dimensions with special attention to outcomes and social validity measures. This study discusses recommendations for best practices for mealtime interventions to be used when training parents and caregivers. Furthermore, the authors provide an analysis of limitations in the current literature along with suggestions for future research.