Growing Healthy Families Online Program

Introductory Webinar
Families! Before you start working on Growing Healthy Families, watch this short webinar for information about the program and tips for getting the most out of it. Click to watch.

The Growing Healthy Families program was developed to help you make good nutrition and physical activity choices for your family. The program is comprised of eight self-paced chapters. Each chapter includes a downloadable activity that you can share with your family.

You want the best for your family, but you are often tired and family members are busy or demanding. It is hard to exercise and eat right. Our families would often prefer to watch TV or play video games than be active. They seem to prefer snacks and meals that are high in fat and sugar. What can we do? We can learn how to help our families be more active and eat healthier! The best guide for them is you!

Learn how you can guide your families by:

• Leading by example
• Shopping wisely and providing healthy foods
• Ordering healthier fast food meals
• Setting limits on when, where and what foods you offer to your child
• Having family meals regularly
• Insisting that TV, video games and computer time is balanced by active time
• Planning active family outings and activities

Obesity in children is considered an epidemic; over one-third of the children in the U.S. are overweight or obese.

Activity and eating habits directly affect children’s emotions, achievement in school, social skills, health and growth.

Register now

Create your free Growing Healthy Families online record where you’ll be able to make your online Activity and Food Journal entries. There’s no software to download, and you can access it from any computer.

Register Now

Getting Started

Journals & Guides to Document Your Progress

Parent Guide and Journal
This Guide and Journal is for you! It provides information, activities and handouts for you to use to complete the eight Growing Healthy Families online modules. The information and activities in the Parent Guide can help you and your family learn new habits to become more active and eat healthier!
We encourage you to download it and print it out to use as a reference as you complete the modules and to keep afterward as a reference document for when you want to go back and review what you learned. We encourage you to make notes on pages of the Parent Guide as you complete the Growing Healthy Families program to extend your records of what you learn. You can download a printable copy here.

Activity and Food Journal
Once you register for Growing Health Families, you get access to a Dashboard and the Activity and Food Journal. This online Journal is a handy place to record your progress as you complete the online program. Write a weekly goal for your eating and physical activity. Use it to set individual or family goals. When you complete the goals, write the date or check it off to remember your accomplishments and how you felt about them. If you did not achieve your goal, write what you may want to change next time! We encourage you to use the online Activity and Food Journal to set weekly food and activity goals, track your accomplishments, and record your observations. Click to access the dashboard and Journal.

Review Your Progress
The goals and notes you enter in the online Activity and Food Journal will be saved, so you can go back and review them. Just go to the “My Journal” part of the Dashboard and click on the chapter you want to review. The system will also save your answers to quizzes and activities throughout the program. You can review these later by clicking on the lesson you want in the Lessons list on the left side of the page.

Let’s begin with the first lesson, Calorie Basics.