Mealtimes at residential summer camps: What are camp staff doing to promote campers' healthy eating behaviors?

Abstract

Objective: To explore camp staff's reports of their interactions with campers during mealtimes at residential summer camps.

Design: Thirty-minute semistructured, face-to-face interviews with staff.

Setting: Two residential summer camps in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Participants: Fifty-two adult (>18 years of age) staff.

Phenomenon of interest: Staff's perceived responsibilities, problems encountered, and feeding practices used during camp mealtimes.

Analysis: Qualitative interviews were analyzed using a hybrid analysis approach that combined deductive directed content analysis with inductive thematic analysis to identify themes and subthemes.

Results: The majority of staff indicated their responsibility during mealtimes was to ensure that campers eat. Common problems mentioned were campers' tendencies toward picky eating and overeating. Staff reported a number of strategies to deal with common mealtime problems including reasoning, modeling, limits or rules, punishment/contingencies, and responding to campers' needs/preferences.

Conclusions and implications: Most staff expressed concern about promoting campers' healthy eating behaviors. Although staff discussed several mealtime strategies that can be interpreted as adaptive in authoritative contexts, they need more guidance related to what they should and should not do during mealtimes. Avenues for future research to inform the promotion of healthier mealtime behaviors in camps are discussed.

Keywords: children; feeding practices; mealtime interactions; obesity prevention; summer camp.