The effect of an early childhood obesity intervention on father's obesity risk behaviors : The Melbourne InFANT Program

Background: To investigate the effect of an early childhood obesity prevention intervention, incorporating a parent modelling component, on fathers’ obesity risk-related behaviours.

Methods: Cluster randomized-controlled trial in the setting of pre-existing first-time parents groups organised by Maternal and Child Health Nurses in Victoria, Australia. Participants were 460 first-time fathers mean age = 34.2 (s.d.4.90) years. Dietary pattern scores of fathers were derived using principal component analysis, total physical activity and total television viewing time were assessed at baseline (infant aged three to four months) and after 15 months.

Results: No significant beneficial intervention effect was observed on fathers’ dietary pattern scores, total physical activity or total television viewing time.

Conclusion: Despite a strong focus on parent modelling (targeting parents own diet, physical activity and television viewing behaviours), and beneficial impact on mothers’ obesity risk behaviours, this intervention, with mothers as the point of contact, had no effect on fathers’ obesity risk-related behaviours. Based on the established links between children’s obesity risk-related behaviors and that of their fathers, a need exists for research testing the effectiveness of interventions with a stronger engagement of fathers.

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2014 Walsh et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

This study was funded by an Australian National Health and Medical Research
Council Project Grant (no. 425801).

S.L. was supported by an Alfred Deakin
Postdoctoral Fellowship (Deakin University). A.J.C was supported by a National Health and Medical Research Council post-doctoral training fellowship. K.H. was supported by a National Heart Foundation of Australia Career Development Award. S.A.M. was supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT100100581). D.C. and K.J.C. were supported by fellowships from the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation.