Child, Youth and Family Studies
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Early care and education (ECE) settings represent a critical environment for shaping children’s dietary behaviors and food preferences. In the United States, the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) is a federal nutrition policy that subsidizes meals and snacks served in childcare while establishing nutrition standards and feeding practice recommendations. CACFP therefore represents a policy lever that simultaneously influences the foods served, the mealtime environment, and provider feeding practices. Research from our team examining CACFP-participating childcare settings suggests that policy participation is associated with stronger alignment with responsive feeding practices compared with non-participating providers. However, important implementation gaps remain. Evidence-based practices such as family-style meal service and autonomy-supportive feeding strategies are inconsistently implemented across childcare settings. Additionally, although CACFP improves the nutritional quality of meals served, children’s actual dietary intake often remains below recommendations, particularly for fruits and vegetables. These findings highlight a critical policy–practice gap. Nutrition policies can successfully improve the food environment in childcare, yet without consistent implementation of responsive feeding practices, improvements in foods served may not translate into improvements in children’s dietary intake. This gap also undermines efforts to understand downstream effects of responsive feeding on child dietary outcomes. To address this challenge, our team developed Ecological Approach To (EAT) Family Style, a coaching- feedback intervention designed to strengthen implementation of responsive feeding evidence-based practices within CACFP childcare settings. The intervention uses theory-informed coaching to build provider capacity and improve implementation of responsive feeding practices and its effectiveness on child dietary and health outcomes.
Dr. Dipti Dev is an Betti and Richard Robinson Associate Professor and in the Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies and Child Health Behavior Extension Specialist at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her research focuses on responsive feeding, early childhood nutrition environments, and implementation strategies to improve children’s dietary intake and health outcomes in early care and education settings. Dr. Dev leads multiple federally funded studies examining how childcare providers influence children’s eating behaviors within nutrition policy contexts. She is Principal Investigator of the NIH-funded $3.2 million clinical trial evaluating the EAT Family Style intervention, a capacity-building approach designed to strengthen responsive feeding implementation and positive mealtime emotional climate and improve children's dietary intake, self-regulation, skin carotenoids in rural family childcare homes ate. S ince 2014, she has published 70+ peer-reviewed articles and has an outstanding mentoring record, with former trainees now serving as faculty and leaders in Extension and public health.