5. Responsive Feeding

Interventions to improve parents' abilities to respond appropriately to infants' cues have been shown to reduce the risk of child obesity and becoming overweight. Responsive feeding is particularly important for infants who are at risk of being overweight.

Responsive feeding involves:

• Recognising infant's cues
• Responding appropriately to infant's hunger and satiety cues
• Learning the difference between infant cues for hunger and other behaviours such as tiredness, boredom, loneliness or fear and matching the response to infant need.

Barriers to responsive feeding include:

• Challenges in recognising infant hunger cues. The myth that crying is most likely to be due to hunger.
• An unsettled infant whose habits are less regular and therefore whose cues are less easy to read by parents.
• Parents' who have perinatal mental health difficulties may find it more difficult to identify and respond to their infants' cues, particularly if the parent has anxiety relating to their infants' health.

Further Responsive feeding advice is available in the resources section.