NCT03976089

Promoting Healthy Development With the Recipe 4 Success Intervention

Promoting Healthy Development With the Recipe 4 Success Intervention: A Randomized Controlled Trial

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 73 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of Wisconsin, Madison · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Months – 36 Months
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

10-session home visit intervention conducted within Early Head Start and designed to reduce low-income toddler's obesity risk and improve their self-regulation skills and parents' sensitivity.

Detailed description

Recipe 4 Success, the product of a university-community engagement collaboration, uses 10 tightly sequenced, structured, and scripted food preparation lessons, delivered as part of Early Head Start home visits, to help low-income parents learn to sensitively scaffold their toddler's self-regulation skills and establish more healthy eating habits. The intervention relies on an active coaching therapeutic approach to deliver content. Recipe 4 Success is focused on parents because their feeding practices influence children's diet, and interventions to prevent childhood obesity are most likely to have long-term effects when they emphasize positive parenting practices. Parents' sensitivity and constructive scaffolding behaviors are related to children's self-regulation skills, which are robust predictors of healthy eating habits and body mass index (BMI). For example, children who have difficulty with self-regulation by age 3 have a higher BMI through age 12. Importantly, these relations may be causal: Adults who are taught self-regulation skills appear more successful in maintaining healthy eating habits over time. As a preventive intervention, Recipe 4 Success is implemented when children are 2, the point at which deliberate self-regulation skills are starting to emerge and develop rapidly and taste preferences are being formed. Recipe 4 Success is designed for families living in poverty because parents are less likely to provide sensitive scaffolding and children are less likely to display well-developed self-regulation skills and healthy eating habits under conditions of economic adversity. Finally, Recipe 4 Success was created to be integrated into Early Head Start to expedite wide-spread dissemination and easy sustainability and to enhance the efficacy of this nation-wide home visit program. If successful, this will be one of the first preventive interventions to improve either toddler's self-regulation skills or their healthy eating habits and BMI.

Conditions

• Obesity
• Poverty

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Recipe 4 Success	The Recipe 4 Success intervention consisted of 10 weekly lessons in which parents and toddlers prepared simple snacks or meals. All Recipe 4 Success lessons started and ended with some evidence-based information for the parents about children's self-regulation skills or healthy eating habits. Most of each lesson in Recipe 4 Success was devoted to the snack or meal preparation activities. Each week, home visitors coached the parents as they worked with their toddlers to make increasingly challenging snacks and meals. During these activities, home visitors pointed out opportunities for parents to practice sensitive scaffolding strategies. At the same time, these meal and snack preparation activities allowed children to practice multiple age-appropriate self-regulation skills.
BEHAVIORAL	Treatment as Usual Early Head Start	Treatment as Usual Early Head Start consisted of an evidence-based curriculum (usually Parents as Teachers) in which home visitors and parents worked with children on activities to support their physical, cognitive, and social-emotional development.

Timeline

• Start date: 2013-04-05
• Primary completion: 2014-02-27
• Completion: 2014-02-27
• First posted: 2019-06-05
• Last updated: 2019-06-05