Young children’s eating practices and mealtimes within early childhood education and care have attracted considerable attention over the past 30 years, with an increasing focus on nutrition and family-style meals. Research in this field is typically conducted in parallel strands that would benefit from an overview perspective and critical discussion. This article addresses that need, reviewing international research from 166 empirical papers published between January 1990 to December 2020. A scoping literature review was used to inductively identify three core areas of research: i) factors influencing children’s eating practices, ii) teacher’s and children’s perspectives on mealtimes, and iii) situated meal practices. Key trends included a focus on repeated exposure, modeling behavior, teachers’ feeding practices, rules and norms vs. playfulness, and participation in the meal as event. Future research could work across disciplinary boundaries and combine a focus on nutritional concerns with an examination of the multimodal interaction within the mealtimes.

在过去的 30 年里，幼儿教育和护理中的幼儿饮食习惯和用餐时间引起了相当大的关注，人们越来越关注营养和家庭式膳食。该领域的研究通常以平行的方式进行，这将受益于概述的观点和批判性的讨论。本文针对这一需求，回顾了 1990 年 1 月至 2020 年 12 月期间发表的 166 篇实证论文的国际研究。使用范围界定文献回顾归纳确定了三个核心研究领域：i) 影响儿童饮食习惯的因素，ii) 教师和儿童的观点关于进餐时间，以及 iii) 就餐习惯。主要趋势包括对重复接触、榜样行为、教师喂养方式、规则和规范与嬉戏的关注，并作为活动参与用餐。未来的研究可以跨越学科界限，将对营养问题的关注与对进餐时间多模式相互作用的检查结合起来。