ORIGINAL PAPER Engaging Low-Income Parents in Childhood Obesity Prevention from Start to Finish: A Case Study

The Author(s) 2012. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Prevention of childhood obesity is a national priority. Parents influence young children’s healthy life-styles, so it is paradoxical that obesity interventions focus primarily on children. Evidence and theory suggest that including parents in interventions offers promise for effective childhood obesity prevention. This case study engaged parents ’ as co-researchers in the design, imple-mentation and evaluation of an intervention for low-income families with a child enrolled in Head Start. Parent engagement mechanisms include: (1) targeted partnership development (2) operationalizing a Community Advisory Board (CAB) that was the key decision making body; (3) a majority of CAB members were parents who were posi-tioned as experts, and (4) addressing structural barriers to parent participation. Lessons learned are provided for future research, and practice