Background
Parents feel a responsibility to provide a healthy start for their young children, but struggle to realise this. Especially in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, parents face challenges such as financial strain, stress, and isolation. Facing these challenges can contribute to tensions between parents’ values, such as balancing family harmony with healthy food choices. Such value tensions may negatively affect the nutrition decisions parents make for their children. Nutrition interventions often fail to address these value tensions, which contributes to their relatively low uptake and impact. By understanding the tensions parents face between their values, the present research offers recommendations for future nutrition interventions to encourage healthy nutrition decisions in disadvantaged situations.

Methods
We conducted a qualitative interview study using semi-structured interviews with 20 parents of children aged zero to four years, living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Transcripts were analysed inductively to identify value tensions, stressors that trigger them, and protective factors that mitigate their impact.

Results
Six key value tensions parents experienced regarding nutrition were identified, which emerged in situations involving, for example, stress, low income, or limited social support. The three most common tensions included balancing the value of the dietary health of the child with the values of enjoyment of the child, convenience for the parent, and well-being of the parent. Our analyses showed that the value tensions were triggered by specific stressors, such as challenging child behaviour, unhealthy food provided by friends or family, and lack of me-time for the parent. The participants reported relief from stressors and the resulting value tensions by relying on protective factors such as social and material support, including informal household support and access to healthy, convenient foods.

Conclusions
This study provides insights into how value tensions, stressors, and protective factors influence parents’ nutrition decisions for their children. By addressing these value tensions, alongside other influences such as structural barriers, nutrition interventions may become more fitting and motivating for parents within their specific contexts. In addition to general recommendations on value-based intervention design, our findings offer specific guidance for developing tailored nutrition interventions for families in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. ... Read more

When facing challenging nutrition decisions, parents experience tension between their personal values and those they have for their child. These tensions a risk of leading to unhealthy nutrition decisions, particularly in disadvantaged environments where resources for healthy nutrition are scarcer. Prioritising one value over another, i.e., a ‘trade-off’ such as a child's dietary health over the parent's convenience, can cause stress due to unsatisfactory outcomes and recurring value tension. Drawing on Paradox theory, this qualitative study examines how parents cope with nutrition-related value tensions. Paradox theory explains how individuals manage persistent tensions between competing values by adopting ‘both/and’ strategies that address both values simultaneously rather than choosing one over the other, i.e., ‘either/or’ strategies. In the present study, semi-structured interviews were held with 20 parents of children aged 0–5 living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Using abductive thematic analysis, we identified coping responses classified as ‘either/or’ (value trade-offs) and ‘both/and’ (compromise and paradoxical resolution). While trade-offs were more common, paradoxical resolution strategies, those that address competing values simultaneously, were less frequently employed during challenging moments related to nutrition decisions. Three main themes of ‘both/and’ coping responses emerged from the analysis: planning and preparing food, managing stressful child behaviours, and supporting children's healthy food acceptance. Factors facilitating these coping responses ranged from individual, interpersonal, to community levels, including time availability, social support, and healthy routines encouraged by daycare. Our findings suggest that ‘both/and’ coping, aligned with parents' values and context, can support parents in managing food provision and feeding challenges while upholding their values, provided there are sufficient facilitating factors available. ... Read more