Effectiveness of Parent Focused Group Program on ObesityRelated Behavior & Anthropometric Measurements among 6-12-Year-old Obese Children-A Pilot Study

Abstract

Background: Obesity is caused due to the mismatch between energy intake and expenditure, with food
intake more than the requirements leading to an increase in Body mass index (BMI) as a body measurement
parameter1
. Parent focused group program is an intervention program where parents are involved in targeting
the changes in obesity-related behavior of their obese children.
Objectives: To determine the effectiveness of parent-focused group programs on obesity-related behaviors
of children aged 6-12 years.
Method and Results: The study was conducted in two phases. The first phase included a survey design to
identify overweight and obese children from two randomly selected schools as control and experimentalfrom
the southern part of Kerala, India. The second phase includedan intervention design with a parent-focused
group program for the program’s experimental group, and effectiveness was analyzed from children’s
obesity-related behaviors. The key findings indicated that the parent-focused group program was effective
in the pre-test and post-test scores of anthropometric measures in the experimental group for both boys
and girls. The study suggested that parent-focused programs effectively bring changesin children’s obesityrelated behavior, thus reducing the chances of getting overweight/obese.
Conclusion: Parent-focused group interventions are effective as a preventive strategy in reducing obesityrelated behavior among children.