NEWS

2026.07.22

【Report】 The 91st AJI Frontier Seminar was held! Dr. LIAN Jietao presented “Caregivers’ Concerns About Children’s Mealtime Problems, Feeding Type, and Developmental Outcomes in Chinese Co-Caregiving Families.”

The 91st AJI Frontier Seminar was held online on Tuesday, July 14, 2026. Dr. LIAN Jietao, a Senior Researcher at the Asia-Japan Research Institute, Ritsumeikan University, Japan, gave a presentation titled “Caregivers’ Concerns About Children’s Mealtime Problems, Feeding Type, and Developmental Outcomes in Chinese Co-Caregiving Families.”

Dr. LIAN asked whether the mealtime behaviors that caregivers tend to treat as “problems” actually signal developmental risk. Rather than viewing meals solely as occasions for nutrition, he approached the family table as an everyday setting in which a child’s autonomy, rule-following, and emotional regulation become visible. Because grandparents are commonly involved in raising young children in China (and because earlier findings on that involvement are mixed), he focused not on whether grandparents are present, but on who actually engages with the child’s behavior at the table, and how.

Drawing on survey responses from 619 caregivers of three- to six-year-olds at cooperating kindergartens in Shanghai, the study compared parent-led and grandparent-led households, assessing children’s BMI (by China’s 2023 sex- and age-specific standards), caregiver-reported mealtime behavior, and social-emotional competence measured with the DECA across attachment, initiative, and self-regulation. The difference in who managed meals was not significantly associated with BMI or with overweight risk. Grandparent-led households did report more mealtime difficulties—weaker independent eating, pickier eating, and more playing, spilling, or watching videos—yet the common worry that a child “eats too slowly” did not track with weight risk. What mattered most was the child’s ability to eat independently, which was stably associated with all three dimensions of social-emotional competence; once mealtime behavior was taken into account, the identity of the meal manager no longer predicted those outcomes directly.

Dr. LIAN concluded that family support should focus less on who manages meals and more on how a child’s capacity for independent eating is nurtured, respecting the child’s exploration and satiety cues rather than judging “slowness” negatively. He added that, because the study rests on cross-sectional, caregiver-reported data, future work should combine longitudinal designs, direct observation of the table, and multiple informants.

A lively question-and-answer session followed, with a constructive exchange centered on methodological questions of measurement and study design and on directions for future research.

Please visit the following link for previous AJI Frontier Seminars:
https://en.ritsumei.ac.jp/research/aji/young_researcher/seminar/archive/