Start Date: February 2019

ID #: 76298

Principal Investigator: Erica Kenney, ScD, MPH

Organization: Harvard College

Funding Round: Round 11

See more related research

Share


State child care licensing regulations, which specify the standards for practice to which child care providers must adhere to be licensed, can be a policy tool for ensuring that child care providers use healthy nutrition, physical activity, and screen time practices. However, what state agencies do to support child care providers in actually implementing these practices, and how equitably this is done, is unknown. It is crucial to understand how best to actually translate state child care obesity prevention policies so that they ultimately improve child health; otherwise, efforts to improve the policies themselves may ultimately be futile. The aims are to 1) Identify specific strategies used by state child care licensing and public health agencies to implement nutrition, physical activity, and screen time policies specified in licensing regulations; 2) Explore state child care licensing administrators’ perceptions of barriers and supports to successful implementation of healthy eating, physical activity, and screen time policies and their perceptions of implementation in under-resourced communities, using qualitative interviews; and 3) Assess whether each state’s regulatory context and state demographics predict the total number of the state’s implementation efforts.

Related Research

July 2026

Forecasting WIC Funding Needs: Supporting Families, Strengthening Access

In partnership with Westat and with support from Healthy Eating Research, the National WIC Association (NWA) developed a new forecasting model to project funding needs of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) for Fiscal Year 2027. Report This report describes the model development, including methodology, as well as analysis conducted More

May 2026

A Pediatric Perspective on the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines

Clear, evidence-based guidance on what foods and beverages children and adolescents should consume—and in what amounts—is foundational for promoting healthy growth and preventing diet-related chronic disease across the life course. Yet many children and adolescents in the US continue to have diets of poor nutritional quality. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs), issued every 5 More

April 2026

Policy Priorities and Research Needs for Advancing Healthy Eating: A 2026-2027 Research Agenda for U.S. Children and Adolescents

Given recent changes to nutrition policies and programs and the food environment landscape, the need for new evidence on how these changes impact nutrition, health, and food access is greater than ever. HER has also published a research agenda intended to provide a blueprint for immediate (i.e., 12-18 month) research needs to inform strategies to More