The impact of maternal overweight and emotion regulation on early eating behaviors

• We assess emotion regulation skills of overweight and non-overweight pregnant women.
• We observe mother–baby feeding interactions (7 months after the delivery).
• Stepwise regression was used to predict the quality of the feeding interaction.
• Difficulties in emotion regulation and maternal BMI are the best predictors.

1Empirical data indicate that the risk for childhood obesity and overweight increases when one or both parents are overweight or obese. Such an association, however, cannot be entirely explained only by biological factors. Based on available literature, we hypothesized that maternal emotion regulation might play a role in explaining the intergenerational transfer of overweight and obesity. We conducted a quasi-experimental, longitudinal study: (step I) during the third trimester of pregnancy of 65 Italian women (33 overweight and 32 non-overweight), the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale were administered to assess the quality of their emotion regulation strategies; and (step II) seven months after the delivery, the feeding interactions between the participants and their babies were evaluated in a 20-minute video-recording, by using the Italian version of the Observational Scale for Mother–Infant Interaction during Feeding. When compared to the non-overweight group, the overweight group had more difficulties in emotion regulation, was more psychologically distressed, and had poorer feeding interactions with their babies. Perhaps more importantly, the extent to which the participants were suffering difficulties in emotion regulation during pregnancy predicted, significantly, and beyond the effects of pre-pregnancy maternal weight, the quality of the mother–child feeding interactions 7 months after the delivery.