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For Health Professionals

Six doctors standing in line

We Can!® recognizes the important relationship that health professionals have with parents and families. Parents often turn to health professionals for accurate information and guidance regarding their child's health.

We Can! worked with two of its national partners, The American Academy of Pediatrics and The American Academy of Family Physicians, to develop The Physicians' Role in Preventing Childhood Overweight and Obesitypdf document icon (93 KB PDF) and We Can! Parent Tips: Healthy Families, Healthy Weightpdf document icon (88 KB PDF). These resources for physicians and other health professionals include information on how to enhance children's activity and nutrition.

In addition to these tip sheets, We Can! provides other materials, resources, and community–based opportunities that empower health professionals to help their patients' families. We encourage you to familiarize yourself with We Can! by reviewing the online We Can! Energize Our Families: Parent Program training. The Parent Program provides parents and caregivers with guidance on getting the entire family to eat right, move more and reduce screen time. The online training is great for health professionals and educators, community organizations, or anyone interested in working with parents and primary caregivers to give them the tools they need to help children maintain a healthy weight.

One great benefit of the online training is that you can view the modules at your leisure, and pause it with the click of a mouse if necessary.

Health Professionals can help educate parents and young patients on ways to improve nutrition, increase physical activity, and limit screen time. Health professionals often have the ability to identify at-risk children and youth whose parents or caregivers can most benefit from this information. We encourage you to:

Last Updated: August 26, 2014