Childhood obesity has become a national epidemic (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2012), affecting one in eight preschoolers. Overweight children are more likely to become overweight adults and face serious health problems (Pulgaron, 2013). The preventive intervention Promoting Healthy Development uses 12 tightly sequenced, structured, and scripted food preparation lessons to help parents sensitively scaffold the development of toddlers' self-regulation skills - a robust predictor of excessive weight gain (Francis and Susman, 2009) - and healthy eating habits. Promoting Healthy Development was created for toddlers whose deliberate self-regulation skills are just beginning to emerge (Kopp, 1982) and whose taste preferences are being formed (Birch and Ventura, 2009). The intervention was designed to be integrated into Early Head Start to take advantage of this national home visiting program's pre-existing infrastructure for implementation and to serve children living in poverty who are at highest risk for problems with both self-regulation skills (Evans and English, 2002) and healthy eating habits (Wang and Lim, 2012). Results of a randomized controlled pilot study (N = 74) indicate that Promoting Healthy Development changed all targeted outcome domains, including parents' sensitive scaffolding behaviors, children's self-regulation skills, children's healthy eating habits, and overweight/obese BMI categories. The proposed project also will utilize a randomized controlled design to test efficacy with a larger sample (N = 240). If successful, Promoting Healthy Development will be one of the first preventive interventions to change low- income children's self-regulation skills and healthy eating habits.
Childhood obesity has become a national epidemic (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2012), affecting one in eight preschoolers. The preventive intervention Promoting Healthy Development uses 12 tightly sequenced, structured, and scripted food preparation lessons, delivered as part of Early Head Start home visits, to help low-income parents sensitively scaffold the development of toddlers' self-regulation skills - a robust predictor of excessive weight gain (Francis and Susman, 2009) - and healthy eating habits. Guided by a strong conceptual model that targets critical proximal causes before problems stabilize in high- risk populations (Coie et al., 1993), this preventive intervention relies on the pre-existing Early Head Start infrastructure to facilitate wide-spread dissemination and easy sustainability (Bumbarger and Perkins, 2008). If successful, Promoting Healthy Development will be one of the first preventive interventions to change low-income children's self-regulation skills and healthy eating habits, yielding life-long benefits to multiple dimensions of well-being n the process (Deckelbaum and Williams, 2001; Moffitt, Poulton, and Caspi, 2013).
