Background: Parents play a key role in shaping their child’s healthy weight behavior, yet even child weight interventions that incorporate parents can have limited success due to low participation, low completion rates, and poor program compliance. These problems may persist because interventions assume that families are ready to take action and motivated to acquire healthy weight behaviors, when in reality, there is a great deal of variability in parent readiness to engage in health behavior change. One way to address these pitfalls is to consider parents’ readiness to change as a precursor to intervention and then tailor interventions to match their level of motivation.
Method: Guided by the Health Beliefs Model and the Transtheoretical Model of Change, we examined predictors of parent readiness to change family health behavior in a sample of parents of overweight, school-aged children, as well as, predictors of parent perception of child risk for future problems. Parents, recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, completed an online survey about their self-perceptions (e.g., caregiving efficacy and locus of control), beliefs about health behavior change (e.g., cues to health action, benefits and barriers to change, child-feeding attitudes, and subjective health norms), perception of child risk for future problems, readiness to change, perception of child weight status, child health related quality of life (HRQoL), and perceptions of physician feedback. Results: The full model predicting readiness to change was significant, R2=.31, F=6.26, p<.05. While parent self-perceptions did not predict readiness to change above and beyond demographic variables, parent beliefs about health behavior change and parent perception of child risk for future problems did significantly predict parent readiness to change. Additionally, there was a significant interaction between locus of control and parent perception of child risk in predicting parent readiness. Specifically, parents’ internal locus of control was related to greater readiness to change among parents who have thought more about the risks their child is facing (β = .02, p < .01); however, this was not the case among parents who have not thought much about the risks to their child. Finally, the full model predicting parent perception of child risk for future problems was significant, R2=.25 F=7.55, p<.01, with poorer child HRQoL, less weight status discrepancy, and more perceived physician feedback predicting a greater number of risks thought about by parents. Conclusion: These findings suggest factors that can be targeted in parents with overweight children in the early stages of intervention to increase parent readiness to change and demonstrate the important role of perception of child risk in parent readiness to change.
