Oral

The childhood obesity epidemic has reached our youngest children, and family environment, parental decisions, and modeling can be a powerful lever for improving child diet. To understand how to better engage parents, the public health community needs to know more about how family dynamics, parental roles, and family background and experiences currently affect healthy food availability, modeling and consumption behaviors in families. This session first reviews key socio-economic factors related to family diet, and parental efficacy in preparing healthy foods. Results from in-depth interviews explain how mothers relate to their toddlers on the topics of food, television and physical activity. The inter-relationship between parental gender roles, income dynamics and household responsibilities are related to changes in family diet in an intervention trial. And the correlation between children meeting dietary guidelines and male and female adult role models is explored. Lack of quality time with adults and parents may also influence diet. Using a South Korean nationally representative survey, the relationship between unsupervised time after school, diet and academic performance will be discussed.

Session Objectives: 1. Explain the relationship between parental diet and exercise and parental demographics and family structure. 2. Discuss how head of household modeling impacts food intake of younger and older children within a household. 3. Explain how gender roles and household responsibilities are related to household fruit and vegetable and red meat consumption. 4. Identify the relationship between length of unsupervised time after school, nutrition and academic performance in South Korea.

CE Credits: Medical (CME), Health Education (CHES), Nursing (CNE), Public Health (CPH)