Positive Deviant Behavior and Nutrition Education

Abstract

Tropical Pediatrics editorial, asked, "Can we learn from successful mothers?"His question had not previously appeared in a scientific journal, possibly because it may have embarrassed many professional scientific nutrition teachers to consider it seriously.Nutritional surveys often discover well-nourished children in poor families that inhabit villages where nearly all children are both poor and malnourished.Such well-nourished children are evidence that some mothers, despite poverty, can feed and care for their children successfully.Wray pointed out that, in order to teach useful child-care and feeding practices to poor mothers, we need to learn what local, successful, poor mothers are practicing [1].No one published any answers to Wray's question, but many of us who read it looked for successful mothers and listened to them.In 1976, Sam Wishik and Susan Van der Vynckt of Columbia University proposed a project to identify "positive deviant" (PD) families in order to observe their care and feeding behaviors.They intended to teach those behaviors to mothers of malnourished children and, finally, to evaluate the teaching's impact on children's nutritional status [2].Without referring to Wray's editorial, Wishik and Van der Vynckt characterized the families as "positive deviants" because they deviated from their population's norm in that their children were in the upper quartile of weight-for-age and height-for-age, and their deviation from the norm was in an upward, or "positive," direction.Wishik and Van der Vynckt thus gave "successful mothers" an academically erudite title.They also described methods to identify PD families, study their behavior, and teach PD feeding practices throughout the population.There is no published report of their project's implementation or its achievements.Fourteen years later, in 1990, Zeitlin et al.