Family self-tailoring: Applying a systems approach to improving family healthy living behaviors

The adoption and maintenance of healthy living behaviors by individuals and families is a major challenge. We describe a new model of health behavior change, SystemCHANGE (SC), which focuses on the redesign of family daily routines using system improvement methods. In the SC intervention, families are taught a set of skills to engage in a series of small, family self-designed experiments to test ideas to change their daily routines. The family system-oriented changes brought about by these experiments build healthy living behaviors into family daily routines so that these new behaviors happen as a matter of course, despite wavering motivation, willpower, or personal effort on the part of individuals. Case stories of the use of SC to improve family healthy living behaviors are provided. Results of several pilot tests of SC indicate its potential effectiveness to change health living behaviors across numerous populations.