Promoting Healthy Eating---A Family-Centered Obesity Prevention Randomized Control Trial for Preschool Children

There are alarming changes in recent years, with rates of overweight and obesity tripling in the sample of boys and doubling in the sample of girls in Taiwan. Hence, childhood obesity prevention should be a health priority in Taiwan. The overall goal of the current project is to develop and measure the effectiveness of the healthy preschool children program based on social cognitive theory. The intervention focuses on promoting healthy eating behaviors in preschool children. This project will be conducted in three phases: 1) Qualitative study, 2) implementation of intervention, and 3) follow-up evaluation. Phase one will be a qualitative descriptive design that consist of focus groups (Part one) and in-depth interviews (Part two) with parents with preschool children recruited from local community sites. Qualitative data from Part I and II will provide: (1) a contextualized understanding of factors in mothers’ lives that influence child feeding styles and behaviors; (2) a sense of the prevalence and type of specific barriers for parents in this population. Intervention will be developed based on results of phase one. This intervention is a six-week community-based, parental child-feeding program offered free to families with young children aged 2-4 years, irrespective of weight. Measurements include parental child-feeding practices and child’s anthropometric measurement. The Child Feeding Questionnaire (CFQ) is a self-report measure to assess parental beliefs, attitudes, and practices regarding child feeding, with a concern on obesity proneness in children. Anthropometric measures of children include waist circumstance and body mass index will be taken for the assessment of total and central fat. W/Ht will be also calculated and used as an anthropometric measurement. The final phase of the study will be a follow-up design to evaluate parents’ perception of the intervention and determine the long term outcome of the healthy eating promotion intervention. Outcome measures include parental child-feeding practices and anthropometric measurements. Six and twelve months post intervention assessment will be conducted. The results will be helpful for health professional to develop their knowledge and skills for the promotion of children’s sleep health.