Effectiveness of interventions involving parents on children’s eating behaviours: protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Parents play a pivotal role in shaping their children’s food environment and eating behaviours. Involving parents in interventions designed to promote nutritional outcomes, such as dietary intake in children has been shown to improve parental feeding practices. However, it remains unclear how such interventions influence children’s eating behaviour outcomes. This protocol describes the methods of a systematic review evaluating the effectiveness of interventions involving parents in improving the eating behaviours of healthy children aged 0 to 12 years. Methods and analysis Electronic databases including MEDLINE, EMBASE, CENTRAL, APA PsycINFO, CINAHL, Scopus, and Web of Science will be searched from inception to September 2025. A search strategy is developed to identify randomized controlled trials (RCTs) directly involving parents and reporting eating behaviours in children as either primary or secondary outcomes. Two independent reviewers will screen identified records and extract data on study, participant and intervention characteristics. Study results relevant to our primary and secondary outcomes will also be extracted using a pre-piloted standardized data extraction form. We will use the Cochrane Risk of Bias tool and GRADE approach to assess risk of bias and quality of evidence assessment, respectively. Where possible, meta-analysis using random-effects models will be performed, otherwise a qualitative summary will be provided. Ethics and dissemination Ethics approval is not required for this study as no primary data will be collected. The findings will provide valuable insights for stakeholders to inform and optimize public health policies and practices aimed at empowering families to promote healthy eating behaviours early in childhood. The results will be submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. PROSPERO registration number CRD420251076540 Strengths and limitations of this study This review will include only randomized controlled trials, which are considered the gold standard for evaluating intervention effectiveness and provide high-quality evidence. A comprehensive search strategy across multiple electronic databases and grey literature will be used to identify the existing literature. Study selection, data extraction, and risk of bias assessment will be conducted independently by two reviewers to enhance reliability and reduce potential bias. Variability in intervention components, outcome measures, and follow-up durations may introduce heterogeneity and limit the interpretability of findings. Excluding non-randomized studies may result in the omission of potentially relevant evidence from real-world or community-based interventions that lack trial-based designs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.091 | 0.138 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.028 | 0.038 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.014 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.100 | 0.012 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".