# A Home-based Video and Motivational Interviewing Intervention to Improve Preschoolers Diet Quality and Parental Food Parenting Practices

> **NIH NIH R34** · UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND · 2020 · $237,220

## Abstract

There is an urgent need to create effective interventions to help parents establish a healthy diet
among their children early in life, especially among low-income and ethnically diverse families.
U.S. children eat too little fruits and vegetables and whole grains, and too many energy dense
foods, dietary behaviors associated with increased morbidity from cardiovascular diseases.
Contributing to this poor diet is consuming foods outside the home, having unhealthy foods
available in the home and lack of home-prepared meals. Parents play a key role in shaping their
child's diet and best practices suggest that parents should involve children in food preparation,
offer, model and encourage a variety of healthy foods. In addition, while parents help to shape
food preferences, not all children respond in the same way and certain appetitive traits, such as
satiety responsiveness (sensitivity to internal satiety signals), food responsiveness (sensitivity to
external food cues), and enjoyment of food may help explain some of these differences. Prior
interventions among preschool aged children to improve their diet have not used a holistic
approach that fully targets the home food environment, by focusing on food quality, food
preparation, and positive feeding practices while acknowledging a child's appetitive traits. This
proposal will build upon pre-pilot work to develop and pilot-test the feasibility, acceptability and
preliminary efficacy of a novel home-based intervention with low-income ethnically diverse
families of preschool children to inform a future fully powered randomized controlled trial. The
proposed 6-month intervention, will include 3 monthly home visits by a community health worker
(CHW) trained in motivational interviewing, that include in-home cooking demos. In between
visits, parents will receive tailored text-messages 2x/wk. and monthly mailed tailored materials.
During the last 3 months CHW phone calls will replace the home visits. The intervention will be
tailored for individual families based on the child's appetitive traits. The aims are as follows: Aim
1. To conduct focus groups with 40 ethnically diverse parents of preschoolers to inform the
development of and adaptation of the intervention components; Aim 2. To conduct a pilot RCT
with 60 parent-child pairs (30 intervention/30 control) to determine the feasibility and
acceptability of the enhanced intervention and determine the preliminary efficacy on child diet
quality, feeding practices and availability of healthy foods in the home. The proposed research
will lay the groundwork for a larger RCT to educate, support, motivate, and empower low-
income parents to prepare healthy meals and use healthy feeding practices, which will improve
children's diets and ultimately their health.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9961651
- **Project number:** 5R34HL140229-03
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND
- **Principal Investigator:** ALISON TOVAR
- **Activity code:** R34 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $237,220
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2018-07-15 → 2022-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9961651

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9961651, A Home-based Video and Motivational Interviewing Intervention to Improve Preschoolers Diet Quality and Parental Food Parenting Practices (5R34HL140229-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-25 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9961651. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*