Kids just wanna have fun: Children's experiences of a weight management programme

Objectives:

To explore children's accounts of their experiences of the UK‘s largest childhood obesity programme, MEND (Mind, Exercise, Nutrition…Do it!) (See www.mendprogramme.org).

Design:

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with children who had completed the MEND obesity programme. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA).
Method

Fourteen children spanning diverse areas of London comprised this study (eight male, six female), aged between 11 and 14 years and in secondary school. Participants were interviewed a year after completing one of the London-based MEND obesity programmes.

Results:

This article focuses on the most common and striking theme to emerge from the original dataset (The complete analysis may be found in L. Watson, Unpublished doctoral thesis): Fun. Subthemes were: ‘going with the flow’; active participation in activities that led to new experiences (‘actually doing it’ – seeing the fun side); the importance of others in the experience of fun (‘you do games in unity’ – ‘it's not as fun on your own’).

Conclusion:

Children have fun when engaged in interactive and varied activities with opportunity for individual feedback and improvement. When designing childhood obesity programmes, conditions that optimise children's experience of fun should be emphasised over didactic and risk-heavy information pertaining to childhood obesity.