Pediatric Eating Behaviors as the Intersection of Biology and Parenting: Lessons from the Birds and the Bees

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Current feeding advice to prevent pediatric obesity focusses on caregiver feeding behaviors. This review integrates newer data showing that child appetitive traits also have a genetic component. RECENT FINDINGS: Caregiver feeding behaviors robustly correlate with child eating behaviors; however there is also a strong heritable component. SUMMARY: The satiety cascade delineates the biological drive underlying hunger, satiation and satiety. Innate individual differences exist for the components of the satiety cascade, which may explain the heritability of child eating behaviors. However, given the correlation of caregiver feeding behaviors with child eating behaviors any etiological model should include both genetic/biological components and environmental. Integrating the biological etiology of child eating behaviors into the current environmental model has implications for tailoring feeding advice which needs to move from a “one size fits all” approach, to one that is tailored to individual differences in children’s biological drives to appetite.