Parental perspectives on Children's lifestyles: A Path for school health promotion

Unidades de investigação

• Laboratório Associado RISE- Rede de Investigação em Saúde

  

  Investigador

  Fernando Carlos De Landér Schmitt

• Medicina da Comunidade, Informação e Decisão em Saúde

• RISE-Health

  

  Investigador

  Fernando Carlos De Landér Schmitt

Abstract

The National School Health Program in Portugal advocates for healthy lifestyles. However, school health teams mostly focus their activities on educating children, whereas it is the families who are primarily responsible for managing childrens lifestyles. Although the programme proposes interactive health education activities, such as meetings with the childrens families, few parents participate in these activities. The project Gostar de Mim was created to bridge this gap by promoting healthy family lifestyles in school settings. The project used an evaluating instrument called the Parents Booklet packed with information. This study assessed the usefulness of the booklet in providing health information and planning family engagement. Based on the PRECEDE-PROCEED framework (PRECEDE: Predisposing, Reinforcing, and Enabling Constructs in Educational/Environmental Diagnosis and Evaluation; PROCEED: Policy, Regulatory, and Organizational Constructs in Educational and Environmental Development), this article focuses on the social and epidemiological assessment phases. We examined the health surveillance status of children aged 6-10 years (epidemiological phase) and description of health behaviours in different lifestyle dimensions (behavioural and environmental phase). The Parents Booklet was used to identify parents perspectives on their childrens lifestyles. Data analysis of 568 Parents Booklet (23 schools) use cases showed that the lifestyle priorities, in order, were sleep and rest (95.6 %), energy balance (100 %), oral/body healthcare (95.6 %), alcohol, tobacco/other drugs (73.9 %), consumerism (91.3 %), leisure-time occupation (91.3 %), and literacy and satisfaction at school (86.9 %). Clearly, the Parents Booklet was useful, as it made it possible to obtain information that allowed for participatory school health diagnosis and can guide community nursing actions that need to be developed in schools. Crucially, this tool can be useful for parents, enabling them to be more aware of their childrens lifestyle via self-monitoring as well as increasing their participation in health education.

Keywords

• Healthy lifestyle; School health; Family health; Community nursing; Participatory health research