With their combination of articles, forums and interactivity, websites may have a big role to play in supporting people to live healthier lives, says Netmums founder Cathy Court
Netmums is one of the largest parenting websites in the UK with over 1.2 million unique visitors each month and 700,000 registered members, mainly mums with young children. Our mission is to provide information and support to parents in the UK, empowering them to raise happier, healthier families with confidence.
Netmums has a large, popular section on family food and healthy eating including easy recipes, fussy eating advice and eating on a budget and aims to get more families cooking meals from scratch. In addition Netmums has campaigned for better family food since 2003 and has successfully expressed the views of parents on issues such as front of pack labeling, food additives and schools meals.
We have has previously been successful in encouraging behaviour change in areas important to parents, initially in the ‘Making mums happy’ course and more recently in the Relationships course. Both programmes created a supportive environment by offering a combination of email messaging and a dedicated course forum. This same format, it was felt, could be to help motivate and encourage parents to take steps towards healthier diets for their families.
The course
The ‘Healthy Happy Family Eating’ course, aimed to improve the diets and the enjoyment of family eating for a large number of families using simple e-mailed challenges in conjunction with appropriate web based content and a dedicated discussion forum.
Firstly, Netmums members interested in the course signed up online. Regular emails were then sent to the course participants over four weeks. These emails included challenges and suggestions all based around the following six course principles:
- enjoy good food
- get the balance right
- get organised and get cooking
- swap bad food for good
- eat breakfast, and
- keep hydrated.
Where appropriate, emails linked to relevant information and tools within the Netmums food section and to the dedicated discussion forum.
We used an online quiz linked from the first and last email to assess the success of the course. Statistical analysis of quiz responses showed that participation in the programme had a significant and positive effect on their attitude to the subjects covered by the quiz statements, in particular:
• Organisation and planning of family eating and meal times
• Inspiration of new recipes and food ideas
• A reduction in the concern felt by parents about feeding their families unhealthy diets.
The results infer that a course in this format, using small, daily challenges together with the supportive online environment can make improvements to family eating. By using an integrated, multifaceted approach it may possible to reach and engage with large numbers of families at a relatively low cost. Promotion for future courses is planned through co-operative working with Health visitors, Primary Care Trusts, Doctors and Sure Start Children’s Centres.
Cathy Court is a director and co-founder of the parenting website Netmums - http://www.netmums.com/home
She set up Netmums in 2000 with two friends from Harrow and it is now one of the most popular parenting websites in the country with over 1.2 million unique users each month, mainly mums with young children.
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Comments
In answer to the post above, the socioeconomic mix of netmums members is very varied with 31% from D/E groups (this is actually 12% more than the normal online population). We don't know what the socioeconomic split of the course participants were but the results show that the course had the biggest impact on those participants with a low starting knowledge - this is encouraging as the course seems to foster good eating habits in those that didn't have them to start with. And with our close links with health visitors and surestart centres we are endeavoring to engage with more of the 'hard to reach' families.
The course sounds fab and more friendly than Channel 4's Supernanny approach of 'if they wont eat then starve them into submission'. Just wondering though to what audience does this approach play at...the middle class mum or the working class, socio-economically poor. I doubt the latter and this is what is difficult for social marketing. How do we engage with the dis-enfranchised who lack the money and can only afford to heat the chip pan up?
The aim behind encouraging healthy eating must always be about a long term change rather than just a short term fix. And it's great to read that this course helped parents to improve the planning of meals plus gave them inspiration to try new recipes and ideas. This, combined with the ongoing support and information on Netmums, will hopefully mean that parents will continue to feed their families a healthier diet long after the course has finished!
There seems to be an assumption in some quarters that new parents will automatically know how best to feed their children and how to achieve the right balance in the meals that are serve. Yet as most parents know, getting your kids to eat the right things can be hugely challenging, even if you know what the 'right things' are to start with. The benefits of a forum like Netmums is that parents can access it whenever they need to and can share the experiences (good and bad!) of others. Sometimes the simplest of tips can make all the difference. For me, it was being told that babies often need to encounter a new food on quite a number of occasions before deciding they like it. I was amazed how keeping offering an item which had previously been turned down, over time led to that item become a firm favourite!