Chiyori HAGA
Okayama University, Japan
Title: Child care providers’ perceptions of chil-dren’s lifestyles and risk factors for obesity: A focus group study
Biography
Biography: Chiyori HAGA
Abstract
Child care providers’ perceptions of chil-dren’s lifestyles and risk factors for obesity: The lifestyles of insufficient sleep and skipping breakfast have been pointed out as the problems on child-hood lifestyle since 2008. If the nurses have not had health guidance for parents in spite of knowing these associations, they would not grasp the recent situation on childhood lifestyles. This suggest that the nurses who will have a health guidance for childhood should interview not only parents, but also childcare providers. Therefore, this study attempts to understand child care providers’ perceptions of remarkable children’s lifestyles and discusses potentially successful strategies of cooperation among child care providers, parents, and health professionals for health promotion and the prevention of obesity in preschool children. We conducted 6 focus group discussions consisting of 34 child care providers employed by private and public child care centers, and a public kindergarten in Japan. Systematic thematic analysis was conducted to generate themes to address the study questions. Our results indicate that what the focus group participants discussed with felt mainly into the 3 different kinds of points: “Concerns of Child Care Providers Regarding Parental Attitudes about Nutrition and Nurture,” “Tensions Between Parents and Child Care Providers,” and “Current Obesity Prevention Activities and the Role of Child Care Profession-als.” Child care providers needed a system to demand helps from public health nurses in guiding parents would be effective in pre-venting childhood obesity.