Family-Based Prevention to Promote the Social-Emotional Functioning and Healthy Lifestyle Behaviors of Black & Latinx Children

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Preventive interventions with minoritized families have rarely included content to promote ethnic-racial socialization (i.e., how families teach their children about the values, traditions, and practices associated with their ethnic-racial group). Ethnic-racial socialization plays a key role in mitigating the negative effects of racism on health outcomes and in contributing to children’s social-emotional functioning and healthy-lifestyle behaviors. This omission represents a crucial gap that may be limiting the engagement, reach, and impact of preventive interventions with minoritized families. Furthermore, the prevention and family intervention fields have focused on either social-emotional functioning or healthy lifestyle behaviors, rather than integrating the two domains. Addressing each domain in a separate intervention misses the synergistic effects and is less cost effective than tackling both domains using a single, integrated intervention. To address these gaps, the main objective of this project is to test whether providing parenting support, with an added emphasis on ethnic-racial socialization and healthy lifestyle behaviors, improves the social-emotional functioning and healthy lifestyle behaviors of Black and Latinx children ages 3-6. The guiding hypothesis is that incorporating these components into a parenting intervention will lead to improvements in children’s health as compared to a control condition. This pilot project is novel in that it (a) interweaves positive parenting practices, ethnic-racial socialization, and healthy lifestyle behaviors into a prevention program for Black and Latinx families, and (b) targets preschool aged children using a brief, universal prevention approach, which increases potential for dissemination and scalability. A type 1 hybrid effectiveness-implementation design is used to simultaneously test intervention effectiveness while also gathering information on intervention delivery to inform future implementation trials. The specific aims are to: (a) test the preliminary effects of a preventive intervention on the social-emotional functioning and healthy lifestyle behaviors of Black and Latinx children, (b) identify the preliminary effects of the intervention on parenting outcomes, and (c) examine potential barriers and facilitators to intervention delivery. The expected contribution of this project is to provide important foundational knowledge regarding whether ethnic-racial socialization and healthy lifestyle behaviors can be integrated into a brief parenting intervention to enhance minoritized children’s physical and emotional health. This contribution is significant because it can lead to advancements in prevention efforts focused on improving child health-related outcomes, potentially decreasing health disparities for minoritized children.