Maternal psychological determinants of infant obesity. Development and testing of two new instruments.

We have developed and tested two instruments to measure psychological factors that may affect infant feeding and thus "confound" the relationship between feeding and subsequent obesity. The Maternal Preconceptions of Ideal Infant Body Habitus (IBH) consists of 4 drawings of 9-month-olds exhibiting a range of body habiti from quite lean to very chubby; new mothers are asked to rank the 4 in order of preference for their new baby. The Maternal Feeding Attitudes (MFA) ia a 10-item questionnaire addressing the new mother's food "pushiness". Both the IBH and the MFA produced high test-retest intraclass correlation coefficients (RI's): 0.92 and 0.95, respectively. Significant inverse correlations were found between the IBH and both maternal age (r = -0.38; p = 0.004) and the Green SES index (r = -0.28; p = 0.025), indicating that older, higher-SES mothers prefer leaner infants. Breast-feeding mothers had significantly lower mean IBH scores than did formula-feeding mothers (p = 0.029). The MFA, by contrast, was not associated with any of these variables. We conclude that maternal adiposity preference and feeding attitudes can be reliably measured. Owing to their possible associations with infant obesity and its determinants, we suggest that these factors be included in future studies in this domain.