Developing and Testing an Intervention to Help Parents Reduce Their Children’s Television Viewing

University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston: University of Texas Prevention Research Center

Topics:
Healthy Youth | Nutrition & Physical Activity for Adults | Nutrition & Physical Activity for Youth

This program focuses on teaching parents how to reduce their children’s television viewing and other media usage. The program addresses a family’s awareness of its media habits; family members’ barriers to and motivators for change; and family practices around television viewing and media use. The program will teach parents ways to reduce children’s media usage such as, disconnecting television viewing and eating, setting and reinforcing media use rules, and identifying alternatives to television and other media use. The researchers will conduct focus groups to determine the attitudes and beliefs of parents about their children’s television viewing. For the intervention, 200 families with children aged 6–9 years will be recruited from a large primary care clinic in Houston, Texas. An information packet, including a letter describing the purpose, general design, enrollment criteria, and a consent form will be sent to the parents of all children aged 6–9 who visited the clinic in 2004 to request their participation in the study. Half of the participating families will be randomly assigned to receive the intervention and the other half to a comparison group. The intervention may include workshops for parents, bi-monthly newsletters, and a media use and activity diary. All participants will be followed for one year with surveys conducted before the workshops (baseline), at six months, and at 12 months to determine the program’s effectiveness in changing the daily amount of children’s television and other media use, their nutrition and physical activity, and parental knowledge, beliefs, and satisfaction related to their children’s media use.

 

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