Nutrition and Health Sciences
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 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.
Ashna Chauhan is a doctoral student in Nutrition at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and a Graduate Research Assistant in Dr. Dipti Dev’s lab. Her research focuses on early childhood nutrition environments emphasizing responsive feeding and implementation strategies to improve children’s dietary intake and health outcomes. She is actively involved in NIH-funded cluster randomized controlled trial evaluating the EAT Family Style intervention, led by PI Dr. Dev. Through this work, she contributes to studies examining how childcare providers influence children’s eating behaviors within nutrition policy contexts with a goal to strengthen responsive feeding practices in family childcare homes.