If it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a village to care for children’s food needs.

Children’s health and nutrition outcomes are nurtured directly by family caregivers, but also by a broader “village” of policymakers and governments, health and education systems, social services and civil-society groups, as well as others working at both national and local levels.

Lessons learned from academic research studies help today’s multi-sector villages improve health policies, medical treatments and approaches for preventing children’s food- and eating-related problems.

Yet, medical research studies focus more on what parents are doing wrong than they do on the social conditions and resources that families and communities need to improve kids’ nutrition.

In our recent paper, we found that studies published in medical journals are stuck in a rut, repeating some outdated tropes and assumptions. The recipe to care well for school-aged children’s food needs is due for a refresh.

We are food and nutrition researchers and dietitians who have painstakingly reviewed a breadth of food and nutrition studies, including authoring rigorous reviews about childhood nutrition and family food practices.

Our team recently combed through two leading medical research databases to find out what questions, theories and measurements health researchers commonly use to study the processes involved in caring for school-aged children’s food and nutrition needs.

We couldn’t find a term that described exactly what we were looking for, so we proposed a concept and research framework called “food care.” We described the concept of food care as “the processes of feeling concern or interest about food, or taking action to provide food necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, or protection of oneself or someone else.”

We found lots of valuable studies about what children eat, risk factors for sub-optimal diets and describing

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