NCT05802160

The Good Start Matters - Parenting Program

A Good Start Matters for Parents and Children: an MHealth Parenting Intervention to Promote a Healthy Child Development

• Status: Recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 118 (estimated)
• Sponsor: University of British Columbia · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 30 Months – 6 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Early childhood is an important period where the family can support the development and maintenance of healthy eating and active behaviors to prevent or reduce childhood obesity. With this ultimate goal, we designed the Good Start Matters - Parenting program, which aims to engage families in positive parenting practices that support healthy child behaviors, and aim to evaluate the efficacy of this intervention with a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT). The Good Start Matters - Parenting program is a 2-month mobile-Health (mHealth) parenting intervention which promote positive parenting (primary outcome) and support children's healthy nutrition, physical activity, and decrease screen-time (secondary outcomes).

Detailed description

Early childhood is an important learning period where dietary, physical activity and sedentary habits are forming, and developing unhealthy habits will set children up for obesity and other health risks later in life. Moreover, during early childhood the familial environment plays a key role in shaping children's behaviors through their parenting practices, which altogether illustrate the potential of the early years as a developmental period with opportunities for obesity prevention. This Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) evaluates the efficacy of the Good Start Matters - Parenting intervention, a mobile-Health (mHealth) aimed at improving parenting and co-parenting practices and child health behaviors among British Columbian families of preschoolers. Participating families complete measurement tools at baseline and after 10 weeks. Families randomized into the intervention condition receive immediate access to the app, and control families receive access to the app after the completion of the second assessment. We expect that compared to control group families, intervention group families significantly improve their parenting and co-parenting practices and improve child health behaviors after 2 months of app use.

Conditions

• Parenting Practices
• Co-parenting Practices
• Child Eating and Dietary Behaviors
• Child Physical Activity/active Play/outdoor Play
• Child Screen Time

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Good Start Matters - Parenting intervention	The Good Start Matters - Parenting intervention is a 2-month mobile-Health (mHealth) parenting program that aims to improve parenting practices and child health behaviors among British Columbian families of preschoolers. This intervention uses a familial approach and blends the best practices and evidence to promote positive parenting regarding 3 main areas: nutrition, physical activity, and screen-time; which altogether aim to support the development of healthy habits among young children. The mHealth app releases new material on a weekly basis and participants' engagement with the app takes about 30 minutes per week.

Timeline

• Start date: 2023-04-01
• Primary completion: 2025-04-01
• Completion: 2025-04-02
• First posted: 2023-04-06
• Last updated: 2025-01-14

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Canada