Implementing nutrition pillars and practices to improve early childhood classrooms for children with disabilities

There is a need to improve the nutrition environment of childcare centers serving young children of higher risk and that are underserved, including racial and ethnic minority groups and people living in rural communities. Children at the intersection of these two disparities (ethnic minority status and CSHCN) have rarely been studied¹, yet obesity is 38% higher in children with disabilities compared to their peers without disabilities and three to four times higher in non-Hispanic black and Hispanic preschool age children compared to non-Hispanic whites. These statistics are concerning because obese preschool-age children are five times more likely to be overweight during adolescence

To address this issue, we developed the Healthy Caregivers-Healthy Children program which was designed to implement a nutrition program in child care centers. The goal is aimed at taking children off the trajectory of becoming overweight. The program is underway, however, our baseline data was collected which shows that over 50% of the 240 children we sampled had a BMI in the obese or overweight range. These are children who are ages 2 to 5 years old. Thus, there is clearly a need to intervene.  We developed a nutrition program focused on snack and beverage pillars and implemented it childcare centers serving children with disabilities. We will discuss how the program was implemented.