Food, Feeding, and Your Family (FFYF) is a parenting education program that promotes best-practice feeding in parents of 2- to 8-year-old children. In seven short weekly videos (2-8 minutes long), parents learn about:
- Shopping with their child
- Encouraging their child to try new foods
- Child portion sizes
- Effective mealtime routines
- Attending to their child’s cues of hunger and fullness
- Cues to eat in the environment outside of the home
- Parent and child roles at mealtime
Content for FFYF (and much of the video material) was derived from Strategies for Effective Eating Development (SEEDS)—a scientifically-validated parenting education program that, in a USDA funded randomized controlled trial of 255 mothers and young children, increased best-practice feeding and reduced childhood obesity 12 months later.
In the research evaluating FFYF (a randomized controlled trial of 530 parents of 2- to 8-year-olds participating in the Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program in Colorado and Washington State), parents watched the videos, completed a short activity to reinforce the video content, and received an infographic summarizing the video material. As described in the Research section of this website, both online and in-person versions of FFYF led to positive changes in parents’ feeding knowledge and practices.
Individuals who register in the Accessing the Materials section of this website will get free access to the program videos; due to technical issues, the infographics and online activities are not available.
FFYF was developed through a collaboration between Baylor College of Medicine’s Children’s Nutrition Research Center, Washington State University Extension, and Colorado State University Extension and funded by the United States Department of Agriculture, USDA 2015-68001-23311.
