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

December 2024

Evidence to Support an Additional CACFP Meal Reimbursement for Family Childcare Home Providers

This policy brief provides evidence supporting the need for an increase in the number of reimbursable meals and snacks under the federal Child and Adult Care Food Program, also known as CACFP, from three to four per child daily. CACFP provides nutritious meals to nearly 625,000 children attending family childcare homes nationwide, primarily from lower-income More

September 2024

Water Is K’é: Learning from the Navajo Community to Promote Early Child Health

Drinking water instead of sugary drinks is key to reducing health disparities. Since beverage habits are shaped by complex personal, community, and environmental factors, community input is critical to design any intervention promoting water. The research team worked with community partners to design a program to promote healthy beverage habits among young Navajo children. The More

August 2024

Community-based diet and obesity-related policy, system, and environmental interventions for obesity prevention during the first 1000 days: A scoping review

Community-based policy, systems, and environmental interventions have the potential to reduce modifiable risk factors for obesity early in life. The purpose of this scoping review was to characterize the breadth, generalizability, and methodological quality of community-based diet and obesity-related policy, system, and environmental interventions during the first 1000 days of life, from pregnancy to 24 months More