Tailoring Health Services for Managing Pediatric Obesity: A Proposed, Practice-Based Framework for Working with Families

To optimize the likelihood of success, guidelines for managing pediatric obesity recommend using family-based strategies, focusing on improvements in lifestyle and behavioral factors, and matching health services to families’ (children’s, adolescents’, and parents’) motivation to change. To date, there has been little specific guidance for clinicians to operationalize the directive to tailor their counseling to families’ motivation (readiness, willingness, and ability) to change obesogenic habits. In this paper, we propose a conceptual heuristic that clinicians can use to tailor intervention approaches to a family’s motivation to change obesogenic lifestyle and behavioral factors. Insight regarding families’ motivation and developmental capabilities needed to implement changes are the foundation of our proposed model, which is informed by Prochaska’s Transtheoretical Model and Stages of Change. This practical framework can help to reduce the complexity of pediatric obesity and to guide clinicians in working with families efficiently and effectively.