Getting a Handle on Child Care Providers Knowledge About Children's Environmental Health

• In Event: 1-074 - Increasing Public Understanding of Environmental Influences on Children’s Health Through Community Engagement

Integrative Statement

The goal of the Children's Environmental Health Research Center (CEHC) at Illinois is to study the impact of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDC) on children's neurological and reproductive development and function. These chemicals are ubiquitous and found in items such as food storage containers, personal care products, toys, and cleaning products. The Center's research is also addressing whether obesity or a diet high in saturated fats interacts with exposures to these chemicals to increase risk, and whether oxidative stress and/or inflammation play a role in mediating the effects of these chemicals. The focus of the Community Outreach and Translation Core (COTC) of the CEHC is to provide information to child care providers, policy makers and the general public about reasonable actions that can be taken to reduce children’s environmental exposures that could be harmful to their health.
Child care providers are particularly important to target as in the United States most children under 5 years of age spend a significant amount of waking hours in non-parental child care. Recent analysis have indicated that endocrine-disrupting chemicals are present in child care but the knowledge of their risks by child care providers may be non-existent or nascent. To date, the focus of environmental health in child care has been on more immediate safety (e.g. choking.)
We conducted a pilot survey of child care providers about their knowledge and concerns about environmental exposures as potential health risks for children under their care, with a heavy emphasis on the exposures of interest for the CEHC, endocrine disruptors. We found that a majority of providers had a low level of understanding of what sources of exposures in the child care environment might be and that they did not consider environmental exposures to pose a significant risk to children.
We conducted in-depth interviews with child-care providers from urban, suburban, and rural areas to inform the development of a messaging campaign for child care providers. We assessed overall health literacy, understanding of toxins and chemicals and their effects on children’s health, and their current child-care practices that would impact children’s health. Results were used to create a targeted messaging campaign that included strategies providers could use to reduce environmental exposures.
We collected pilot survey responses from child care providers in rural, urban, and micro-urban settings regarding their current child care routines relevant to EDC exposures and their knowledge and understanding of the role these chemicals play in children's environmental health and developed a public service announcement (PSA). The PSA was unveiled at a large statewide conference for child care providers that also featured a keynote speaker and breakout sessions addressing environmental influences on children’s health. The overwhelming response from providers was that they wanted to know more about all environmental exposures that impact children’s health, not just EDCs (e.g. air pollution, arsenic, PBDE’s, pesticides).

Authors

• Brenda Koester, University of Illinois at Urbana Champain
  Presenting Author

• Stephanie Sloane, Family Resiliency Center, University of Illinois at Urbana Chamapaign
  Non-Presenting Author

• Barbara Fiese, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Non-Presenting Author