Home Gardening Resurgence During COVID: Motivations and Perceived Benefits of Participating in Grow This!

Gardening is associated with a wide array of health benefits. We describe the dissemination of a low-cost social media-based campaign (Grow This!), an intervention intended to reach novice gardeners and which combined elements of old (seeds) and new (Facebook) technology. Grow This! was implemented before (2018, 2019) and during (2020) the COVID pandemic, providing an interesting framework for understanding participants' motivations for gardening. Pre- and post-surveys assessed a variety of topics, including participants' motivations for participating in Grow This!, how they planned to participate, previous gardening experience, the main benefits attributed to participation, and intentions to garden in the future. Descriptive statistics and qualitative analysis were used to analyze the survey data. More than 25,000 people participated in Grow This! over the 3 years, with the majority (77%) participating as a family. Participation in the project spiked during COVID. Primary motivations for participating in Grow This! pre-COVID were education, enjoyment, family engagement, and self-sufficiency; during COVID, motivations remained the same, but shifted in rank. Just over a third of participants were novice gardeners. Participants attributed numerous benefits to their participation, including stress reduction/relaxation, more outdoor time, reduced grocery bills, and eating more fruits and vegetables than normal. A total of 83% of respondents reported being highly likely to have a garden in the future. Home gardening as an intervention is ripe for dissemination, particularly in the aftermath of COVID. Public health professionals can benefit from this understanding of people's motivations to garden and the perceived benefits associated with gardening.

Is parent and child weight status associated with decision making regarding nutrition and physical activity opportunities?

The objective of this study was to evaluate parents' versus children's level of decision making in regards to healthy eating and physical activity practices and how it relates to weight status. Cross-sectional parent responses to a series of visual analog items assessed the level of both parent and child involvement in decisions related to nutrition and physical activity. Participants included parent-kindergarten student cohorts in West Virginia from 2007 to 2009 (n=634). Mean nutrition and physical activity decision making scores were compared across four groups of parent and child weight status combinations. The results indicated that parents described equal involvement of the parent and child in nutrition and activity decisions within the home. Within families where the parent and/or the child were obese, parents reported more involvement of the child in nutritional decisions. Families with an obese parent and an obese child reported the highest level of child involvement in these types of decisions. In summary, this study found that families share involvement in decisions but greater child involvement may be associated with adult and/or child obesity. At least for younger children, decisions may prove healthier if parents have an equal or greater amount of input in the decisions related to healthy lifestyle choices.