Abstracts
The Parenting, Eating and Activity for Child Health (PEACH) Study: Supporting Parents to Manage Their Children’s Weight
Rebecca Perry
PhD student, Flinders University,
Dept of Nutrition and Dietetics, School of Medicine
Supervised through Dept of Nutrition and Dietetics, Flinders University; Discipline of Psychiatry, University of Adelaide; Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, Queensland University of Technology
Childhood obesity affects up to 20% of Australian children and effective treatment strategies are urgently required.
We have developed a program to test how important it is to combine parent skills training with healthy lifestyle information to assist parents of overweight children to manage their child’s weight. Once enrolled in the program, families were placed into one of two groups (healthy lifestyle information with or without parent skills training) and parents attended 8-12 group information sessions spaced out over 6 months. At the beginning, end and 6 months after the end of the program, we measured parents’ and children’s weight and height, and also collected information on the children’s diet, activity and quality of life and details of the parents’ style of parenting. We found that at the end of the program all children had reduced their degree of overweight, but the children whose parents had received the parenting skills training performed better than the other children. By 12 months, this difference disappeared but both groups had maintained the reduction in overweight seen at the end of the program.
The PEACH program resulted in a reduction in children’s degree of overweight and families were able to maintain this 6 months after the end of the program without further program contact. Further examination of the effects the program had on health behaviours and longer term follow-up of weight status is underway. This program will identify ways to best support families to manage their children’s weight in the long-term.
