How a mother touches, or doesn’t touch, her infant may predict the baby’s risk of developing severe feeding problems such as refusing food or malnutrition, new research shows.

Israeli investigators found that infants with feeding disorders and their mothers both tend to show less touching overall, are less receptive to the others’ touch, and spend more time out of reach of each other.

These findings suggest that infants with feeding problems and their mothers may have “fundamental relationship difficulties.” The way they touch each other may predict how well an infant will eat and, subsequently, grow, the authors report in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

To investigate how mother and infant interactions might relate to feeding problems, Dr. Ruth Feldman of Bar-Ilan University and her colleagues observed 20 infants with feeding disorders and their mothers, and compared them to 27 normal eaters with other problems, such as sleep or anxiety problems. Both groups were also compared to 47 infants with no eating or other disorders.

Feeding disorders included vomiting and struggling during feeding. Infants were all between 9 and 34 months old.

The researchers visited infants’ homes and observed mothers and infants during play and feeding.

The investigators found that mothers of infants with feeding disorders showed less affectionate touching and accidental touching than mothers of infants with normal eating habits.

Moreover, infants with feeding problems showed less affection towards their mothers, and were more likely to push away or hit their mothers, or reject their mothers’ touch.

The mothers of these infants were more likely to be depressed. “Feeding is the most basic life-sustaining maternal function and difficulties in providing nurturance combined with discomfort in maintaining closeness possibly colors the mother’s sense of herself as a parent,” Feldman and her colleagues write.

“Raising professional awareness to early signs of touch aversion may lead to the construction of specific interventions that focus on physical closeness before relational patterns have escalated into mutually reinforcing negative feeding interactions,” they add.

SOURCE: Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, September 2004.