New Study Confirms Benefits of Parents Plus Healthy Families Programme
Developed in 2019 after a series of focus groups and workshops with families, the Parents Plus Healthy Families (PP-HF) programme is designed to support parents of babies and young children up to 12 years old to establish healthy habits that promote family health and wellbeing. Now, the results of a new randomised controlled trial published in the Archives of Public Health has confirmed the benefits for families participating in the programme which are maintained at 6 weeks follow-up.
Parents Plus Healthy Families is an 8-week group parenting programme that aims to help families to build healthy habits in areas such as healthy eating, creating happy family mealtimes, incorporating active play and physical activities into their day, maintaining positive mental health and self-esteem, establishing good routines for sleep and rest, setting rules around technology use, and building positive family relationships.
A multisite cluster randomized controlled trial was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of the PP-HF program across 16 community-based and clinical settings. Sixty-eight parents of children aged 2–12 were assigned to the PP-HF group and 70 were assigned to the treatment as usual (TAU) control group. Multi-level modelling analyses demonstrated that post-intervention, compared to the control group, parents in the PP-HF condition reported significant improvements on measures of healthy habits, parental satisfaction, family functioning and child behaviour problems. Gains were maintained at 6-weeks follow-up.
Parents commented on benefits such as receiving support from the group, the opportunity to take time for reflection, and learning new skills.
I feel the course has empowered me as a parent and has given me the tools I need to get to where I want to be. I feel we have more structure and feel more connected with my family. Since I started the course, my bin is now full of fruit peeling rather than sweet wrappers.
For more details on the results of this trial, you can read the full study published in April 2025 in Archives of Public Health (impact factor 3.3, Published by Springer / Nature) here.
