HOMESTYLES: SHAPING HOME ENVIRONMENTS AND LIFESTYLE PRACTICES TO PREVENT CHILDHOOD OBESITY: A RANDOMIZED CONTROL TRIAL

The 'HomeStyles: Shaping Home Environments and Lifestyle Practices to Prevent Childhood Obesity' project is a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, multi-state, integrated research, education, and Extension project that will generate new knowledge about how parental shaping of home environmental and lifestyle behavioral factors affects weight gain in preschool children. This project will create a novel, sustainable, culturally-competent intervention (delivered in-home face-to-face or online) that enables and motivates parents to shape home environments and lifestyle practices (diet, exercise, sleep) to prevent excessive weight gain in preschoolers. A multifactorial approach is used because diet, exercise, and sleep are associated with childhood obesity risk and successful results are likely to be generated by addressing multiple lifestyle practices in a family context. This intervention will apply community-based participatory research principles and be aligned with IOM, CDC, White House Task Force, 2010 Dietary Guidelines, and Healthy People 2020 obesity prevention recommendations and Social Cognitive and Adult Learning Theories. This project will adapt and/or create valid, reliable instruments for assessing the degree to which home environments and lifestyles prevent excessive weight gain; provide inservice training for home visitation staff and online facilitators; provide informal education of parents; and build obesity prevention programming expertise of the next generation of nutrition educators via formal college coursework. The intervention will provide a sustainable model for confronting and combating obesity and safeguarding overall health that can be brought to scale on a nationwide basis. The products of this project will be widely accessible, sustainable, and enduring well beyond the funding period.