Investigators: A/Prof Hayley Christian, Anna Bird
One in four Australian children aged five years and under are overweight or obese; and significant proportions of children under five fail to meet guidelines of diet quality, physical activity, screen time, and sleep.
Goals
To promote healthful lifestyle behaviours and prevent obesity in children and families attending community playgroups.
The intervention will simultaneously promote four key lifestyle behaviours associated with obesity risk (poor diet, physical inactivity, excessive screen time, and short sleep duration) and other chronic health conditions such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
The effectiveness of the intervention will be tested in a two-arm cluster Randomised Controlled Trial involving 60 community playgroups across Australia (QLD, WA, SA).
Outcomes
- The program is designed to be a casual conversation between parents attending playgroup. Parents help each other to overcome common challenges such as fussy eating, children’s sleep, physical inactivity and excessive screen time.
- A peer facilitator, trained in the Healthy Conversations @Playgroup program, will visit each playgroup five times throughout the school term and start conversations designed to spark further conversation between parents.
- Study outcomes (fruit and vegetable intake, daily physical activity, screen time, sleep duration and BMI z-score) will be assessed at baseline, 10 weeks after the first assessment and six months later.
- We are seeking to determine whether this program is effective so that it can be delivered to more playgroups across Australia so more parents can benefit.
Funding
- MRFF Preventative and Public Health Research Grant (2020-2023)
Administering Institution:
- Queensland University of Technology (Prof Stewart Trost)
External collaborators
- Prof Stewart Trost – University of Queensland
- Prof Rebecca Golley – Flingers University
- Dr Rebecca Byrne – Queensland University of Technology
- A/Prof Kate Williams – Play Matters Australia and Queensland University of Technology
Project Partners
- Playgroup WA Inc
- Playgroup SA
- Playgroup QLD (part of the Play Matters family)
- Community playgroups operating in Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia