Affecting Family Support for Home Gardening through An After-School Garden Club Intervention

projectPLANTS, Promoting Lifelong Activity and Nutrition Through Schools, is utilizing the Social Ecological Model and Social Cognitive Theory to promote gardening in fourth and fifth grade youth and their families as a strategy for overweight and obesity prevention. Support from a child’s family environment is crucial since we aim to have the child adopt these behaviors permanently.  Parental behaviors for starting and maintaining a home garden, decreasing sedentary behavior, and increasing fruit and vegetable consumption are targeted through the psychosocial indicators self efficacy, knowledge, perceived social support, and outcome expectancies, including perceived benefits and barriers, for each of the desired outcomes.  Many methods of implementing the home component have been built into the after-school gardening intervention.  A biweekly parent newsletter is designed to provide practical strategies to facilitate healthful eating and physical activity through gardening.  In addition to gardening at their school site, all children in garden clubs are furnished with plants to create a home garden.  Complimentary curriculum experiences target the child’s proxy self-efficacy, confidence in their ability to make requests to get parents to act on their behalf such as  daily “ride home” questions that prompt parents with specific questions pertaining to their child’s garden club experiences.  Once per week, the student indicates a physical activity they would like to participate in with their parent over the weekend. Each club collectively sets a weekly goal to achieve one of four main objectives. Journal reflection and group discussion are used and children are encouraged to involve parents in achieving these health goals.  Parental education and support is additionally achieved through interaction with community members trained to act as role models for the children and parents at their site.  This presentation describes the implementation of the parent component of this overweight and obesity prevention intervention.