Becoming overweight between the ages of 9 and 12 has been associated with both short- and long-term health consequences and there is research indicating that individuals who become overweight at an earlier age are at a higher risk for developing more severe levels of obesity in adulthood. This suggests that health promotion efforts should begin during the early adolescent developmental period. There is increasing evidence that parents play an important role in shaping their children's eating and physical activity patterns, not only through the social learning value of their own behaviors and the dietary or activity-related opportunities they provide, but also through their parenting strategies and aspects of the family/home environment. The goals of this project are two-fold. The first is to develop a Family Health Promotion (FHP) program and to evaluate the feasibility of its implementation. As part of the proposed FHP program, parents will learn and practice skills related to: (a) using parenting strategies to elicit desired health behaviors in their children, (b) changing the home environment to promote healthy behavior, and (c) promoting communication, family bonding, and social support among family members. Targeting these important, developmentally salient factors, should contribute to the likelihood of successful behavioral change in young adolescents. The FHP program will retain the structure and core parenting and family skill-building components of a well-established, evidence-based family- skills program, while incorporating new content based on important family-level and individual-level determinants of dietary behaviors, physical activity, and screen time. To examine factors related to implementation feasibility, the FHP program will be conducted with two groups of families who, along with program facilitators, will provide immediate feedback following each program session as well as participate in follow-up focus groups to assist in the identification of potential issues related to implementation. The second goal of this project is to conduct a preliminary evaluation of the FHP program in order to test its short-term efficacy for creating changes in program-targeted proximal outcomes and program targeted behavior change outcomes This preliminary pilot efficacy evaluation will be conducted using a pretest-posttest control group design, with assessments to be conducted at baseline and 1 month past conclusion of program implementation in the intervention group. Findings from this study will be used to inform final program refinements and to provide preliminary data for the next step, which will involve writing an R01 application to conduct a larger-scale, longer-term efficacy evaluation of the newly developed FHP program. ? ? Public Health Relevance: Research has indicated that parents play an important role in the development of children's health behaviors and are therefore in a unique position to help their children make positive dietary changes and to encourage increases in physical activity levels. Currently, there are a limited number of programs that take advantage of the family context for making such health behavior changes in young adolescents. In order to maximize the potential public health impact of such a program, preliminary research related to implementation feasibility and short-term efficacy are needed to demonstrate the utility of a family-based approach for reducing key risk factors for childhood overweight. ? ? ?
