Infants who fail to thrive: An intervention for poor feeding practices

Abstract

Although failure to thrive in the absence of organic cause was originally regarded as an outcome of emotional deprivation, the consensus among practioners now is that it results directly from inadequate nutrition, though the causes of poor feeding practices may well have origins in psychological difficulties of the parents and/or the child. An intervention of a scale which could be provided in a community setting was devised and applied to six mothers whose children were non-organically failing to thrive. The intervention was designed to enable the mothers to provide their child with adequate nutrition and resulted in a significant improvement on all measures after the very short treatment programme.