Abstract

Overweight in children is a significant health issue. We examined the use of Motivational Interviewing to provide feedback about child weight to parents following a screening health check, and examined the impact on acceptance, understanding and retention of the health information. Parents of 244 overweight children (4 – 8 years old) received feedback about their child’s weight using either a best practice care approach (BPC) or motivational interviewing (MI), and two weeks later were interviewed to assess their recall and understanding of the information from the feedback session, and their experience of the feedback. Families were then invited into a long-term intervention consisting of either a Tailored Package (TP) or Usual Care (UC) approach to healthy weight growth in children. The style of feedback did not significantly alter uptake into intervention, however variations in parental experience of the feedback and the kinds of information they retained from the feedback session were evident. Both TP and UC interventions led to improvements in child BMI two years after the initial assessment, with greater reductions achieved by those in the TP condition.

Deirdre Brown, Anna Dawson, Sheila Williams, Adell Cox, Lee Knight, Jill Haszard, Kimberly Meredith-Jones, Elaine Hargreaves, Jim Ross, Barry Taylor, Rachael Taylor

This study was funded by a three-year grant from the Health Research Council, New Zealand (PI: R Taylor).