Home ยป Health & Parenting ยป Family Health ยป Family Health & Development

Why Life is PEACH -y for the Drydens

Theyโ€™re spending more family time together, the kids are sleeping better, activity levels are up, TV levels are down, tummies are more โ€œin tuneโ€, and their health-related worries have eased.

And they credit a lot of it to the QUT-led PEACH program โ€“ a free healthy lifestyle six-month program aimed at families and funded by the Queensland Government.

Meet the Drydens

Brisbaneโ€™s Dan and Carly Dryden, and their children Ava (7) and Sienna (4), joined the program mid-2015 after seeing a TV story about it.

โ€œMy wife and I had been talking about going to a dietitian to make sure we were getting it right for our kids, so I jumped on the web to look up the PEACH program and it was just what we were looking for,โ€ Dan said.

The family already ate healthy food, but portion size and knowing when tummies were full was more of an issue โ€“ particularly combined with a lack of exercise.

โ€œIn Australia, if you have a toddler or baby and they are hoeing into their food everyone praises you: โ€˜Oh what a good eaterโ€™, it is something that is celebrated, and the Drydenโ€™s have celebrated this approach to eating with all our family,โ€ Dan said. โ€œBut that โ€˜healthy appetiteโ€™ can turn into a problem.โ€

Meet the PEACH Program

The PEACH program includes nine weekly group sessions at a local community venue (plus a 10th follow-up session down the track) which focus on teaching parents about nutrition, relationships with food and eating, how to change family lifestyle behaviours and making healthy eating affordable.

While the parent sessions are taking place, the kids enjoy active play with a trained child physical activity facilitator.

โ€œThe girls were both a little bit shy at first and didnโ€™t want to be there, but it taught them it is fun to be active and play games and run around and get sweaty,โ€ Dan said.

โ€œWe went in thinking weโ€™ve got improve our eating habits but what we got out of it was a more wholistic view about a healthy lifestyle for the whole family.

โ€œWeโ€™re very aware now that activity level goes hand in hand with screen time and weโ€™ve limited screen time. With eating, the big message we are trying to get through to both our kids is โ€˜listen to your tummy โ€“ know when you are fullโ€™.โ€

PEACH program Dryden family reading a book together

The importance of routines

Routine is now very important in the Dryden household.

โ€œScreens go off at dinner-time and stay off,โ€ Dan said.

โ€œDinner time goes into tidying up time, into bath time, and to bedtime. We went from struggling to get them into bed by 7.30-8pm to now being in bed at 7pm every night. And they are sleeping in more too so overall they are getting much more sleep.

โ€œThe girls do karate, weโ€™ve bought a couple of basketballs and we walk to school sometimes. We have a pool and that gets lots of use and they love dance parties. And once every couple of weeks we do something very active, like all go do a bushwalk together.โ€

Dan said he went into PEACH hoping there would be a โ€œlightbulb momentโ€ or โ€œsilver bulletโ€ that would change everything.

โ€œBut there wasnโ€™t that one magic thing,โ€ he said. โ€œIt was about wholistic lifestyle changes and doing it bit by bit โ€“ but it has worked. One of the biggest things is that the kidsโ€™ attitude toward being active has changed โ€“ thereโ€™s not a groan every time we talk about it. And, as parents, itโ€™s about us enabling that activity and getting past that โ€˜too busyโ€™ factor.โ€

Families with a primary-school aged child are eligible for the free PEACH (Parenting, Eating and Activity for Child Health) program, which is run by QUTโ€™s School of Exercise of Nutrition Sciences. Call 1800 263 519 or register directly at http://www.peachqld.com.au/.

This article was published in Issue 14 of our print magazine, February/March 2016.

Photo of author

Janine Mergler

Janine Mergler is a veteran Queensland teacher, graduating from QUT with a BEd majoring in Social Sciences. After many years in the classroom, Janine moved on to academia. She has proudly trained new generations of teachers in her role as a lecturer at Queensland University of Technology Faculty of Education. She has also worked in the Queensland Government as an education specialist, developing education resources and delivering community awareness programs to help families conserve water. Currently she is the owner and editor of Families Magazine, a publication specifically targeted at parents who value a quality education for children.ย  Janine leads a team of professionals who write about family lifestyle, early childhood, schools and education information and family-friendly events.

Leave a comment