Two interventions help improve weight management in children with overweight or obesity
More and more we recognize that, if we don't assist families in tackling the social and environmental conditions that impede their ability to make changes to their obesity-related behaviors, we will not be successful in pediatric weight management," says Elsie Taveras, MD, MPH, chief of General Pediatrics at MassGeneral Hospital for Children, who led the study. "To help us create our interventions we looked to families with children who had managed to improve their BMI, often under challenging environmental and social settings. These "positive outlier" families provided guidance on the content of health coaching, available resources in the community, language to use in motivating other families to change and the importance of building parents' confidence in taking on the challenge of reducing their child's excess weight." The Connect 4 Health trial was conducted from June 2014 through March 2016 at six Harvard Vanguard pediatric practices in th...