Dr. John Sharry:

I thank the Chairman and we are very grateful to be here to have an opportunity to present from Parents Plus.

Parents Plus is a national charity that develops evidence-based parenting programmes to support families to overcome emotional behavioural problems.

We have noticed in the past 20 years a big increase in the difficulties for families regarding unhealthy eating and relating to all of the health and emotional problems that brings into families. We are all aware of the health difficulties that obesity can bring but equally, there are all the emotional and behavioural problems in families, as well as the relationship difficulties that are caused.

Presenting with me here today I am delighted to be joined by my colleague, Dr. Adele Keating, who is a psychologist in Our Lady's Children's Hospital, Crumlin and who works with Parents Plus. One of the strengths of the Parents Plus approach is that we have tried to collaborate with other agencies, such as the HSE, the hospitals and Tusla, to deliver parenting programmes to families.

As the committee has just heard an eloquent submission from the Irish Heart Foundation about the challenges of marketing to families, I will not spend too much time providing details on those issues. Certainly, the families Parents Plus is working with are bombarded with an obesogenic environment, in which it is very much harder to bring up children and to maintain a healthy lifestyle than ever before, to the extent that the editor of the The Lancet journal has stated that being obese is a normal response to an abnormal environment.

We want to focus on the whole issue about the potential solutions and on the aspect of supporting families. Families are the basic unit that are being bombarded and are under terrible pressure in a very unhealthy environment. The key to the main solution is to try to support them to manage that. The previous speaker spoke about the pester power families face. Families and parents know a lot about what the children should be eating and about healthy lifestyles but find it very hard to put that into practice. If parents try to buy petrol, they are immediately bombarded with chocolates, drinks and three-for-one offers and they come back out with a whole host of unhealthy foods they are pestered to take with them.

The approach in which we are interested is the basic and most promising approach to our families, which is to support families in accessible small groups in communities to take action against this themselves. It is to empower them with the knowledge that they are not at fault, that they must make choices and must really push back against the environment they are in to change the direction for their families.

The way Parents Plus do this is that we have worked with safefood, as well as with the charity Supporting Parents and Early Childhood Supports, SPECS, in Bray, to deliver good educational information to families in workshops and in small groups. They are delivered through services like family resource services and primary care where one supports parents by setting up good routines around eating and good rules regarding food and sleep in order that they can build a healthy family unit. These are the key aspects of the programme.

In the future, the key message - referred to in our detailed submission that I hope all members have had the opportunity to see - is that an important part of a solution to the obesity crisis, in line with health-based and school-based programmes and environmental changes as to how food is marketed and retailed, is the development of small-group healthy family programmes that are educationally delivered in schools, primary care services and family resource services in which parents are brought together and families are supported to develop healthy eating routines, to make good rules in respect of food, exercise etc. but also are given key lead strategies for dealing with the associated behavioural issues. All the evidence shows that parents know what they should eat and the exercise they should take but the challenge is how to devise an approach. What does one do with a child throwing a tantrum when all of his friends are being bombarded to go to McDonalds? How can the parent help him to make a better choice in such instances?

A key thing in delivering these programmes is they have to accessible and in the communities. As specialist services do not reach half of the families that are struggling with this, it is about getting them out to local communities, helping parents to make the programmes themselves and to be involved in their delivery. This is something that Parents Plus, through the network of the services we work with, are very interested in developing and partnering with agencies like Tusla and the HSE to do.