Why families need playful parenting
Stressful environments, like a pandemic, increase the likelihood of violence against children. A toolkit of parenting resources is helping parents and carers keep their cool, in even the most demanding situations.
Parenting is a tough job at the best of times, but it’s even harder when you are living through a crisis. Money worries, health fears and mental health distress can put a huge strain on families — and that’s before the pressure cooker of lockdowns and school closures is thrown into the mix. Research shows that when stress is dialled up in this way, so is the likelihood of conflict, which puts children at risk of violence within the walls of their own homes.
But there is an effective tool that helps prevent violence against children. Better still, not only can it reduce the tension that leads to conflict, but it can also improve a child’s wellbeing, behaviour and even educational attainment.
‘Playful parenting’ is helping parents and carers in stressful situations around the world find ways to interact with their children in more nurturing and playful ways. Crucially, it doesn’t require endless supplies of glitter, playdough or glue sticks. In fact, it doesn’t require any resources at all. Rather, it’s simply about spending meaningful time with children.
“The most precious gifts you can give your child are time and attention, and these are the fundamentals of playful parenting,” explains Professor Lucie Cluver, Professor of Child and Family Social Work at University of Oxford. “It’s not necessarily about ‘playing’ with your child, but instead giving them at least five minutes a day of one-on-one time doing something they enjoy. That could be singing a favourite song, reading a book to a young child, learning a teenager’s new TikTok dance or cooking dinner together.”
A global crisis for families
Lucie, along with Dr Jamie Lachman, Senior Research and Teaching Fellow at University of Oxford, and a team of academics and UN agencies, has spent the past decade developing and testing strategies to promote positive child-parent relationships through the Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH) initiative. By 2020 these evidence-based strategies were being rigorously tested and scaled in 25 low- and middle-income countries across sub-Saharan Africa, south-eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. However, they were designed to be delivered face to face. And then the pandemic hit.
“Before COVID-19, over 1 billion children every year experienced violence. We knew from other health emergencies that when families are forced into lockdown, the chances of children being hit goes up. And that situation suddenly was true for pretty much every family in the world,” says Lucie. “So, I called Jamie and said we have to do something.”
Lucie and Jamie led a team that brought together colleagues in a range of international agencies — including the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children, USAID, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Internet of Good Things — to transform PLH parenting programmes into virtual resources that could be accessed for free across the world.
Tips to tackle parenting challenges
The project — COVID-19 Playful Parenting Emergency Response — distilled the evidence from multiple randomised trials of child abuse prevention programmes into a series of simple, practical and eye-catching tip sheets. Each addressed challenges faced by parents every day, but which were potentially exacerbated by the pandemic. They included themes such as establishing structure and routine, managing difficult behaviours, keeping calm and maintaining harmony in the home. Importantly, they also tackled parental stress.
“Parenting programmes often focus on the parent-child relationship, but during COVID we realised how vital it was for parents and carers to reduce and manage their own stress levels. It formed the basis of our first tip sheet,” says Lucie. “I have young children, and I know how they can drive you crazy, but there are evidence-based techniques to use when the anger is rising.
“One of the most effective is to walk into a different room and slowly breathe in and out 10 times. Of course, during lockdown, personal space was often at a premium, so we had to adapt the suggestions, such as turn to face a wall.”
Transforming advice into song
A key challenge was to make the tip sheets available in multiple languages and relevant for different cultures and faiths. Teams of volunteers, faith-based networks and private sector partners translated them into more than 100 languages and local dialects — and the resources started to take on a life of their own.
“We asked people to adapt them in ways that worked for them, and the results were remarkable. In Kazakhstan they were made into video animations, in Brazil they were performed online by a clown group, and a pastor in Malawi used them as part of his radio sermons, which reached 8 million people each week,” says Jamie. “We even had a Broadway producer turn this evidence-based content into a song.”
To date, the playful parenting resources have been shared by over 240 organisations, 34 national government responses across 198 countries and territories, and reached more than 210 million people around the world.
Impact on family life
Feedback from parents and carers demonstrates the power of playful parenting strategies, such as the mother in North Macedonia who felt it was easy to “get out of control” in times of crisis, but the parenting tools “calmed the domestic situation”. In Cameroon a mother said they were “like medicine to me, as I am no shouting or screaming at my children”, and a father in Malawi felt “an amazing weight of stress… removed off my shoulders as I parent”.
Evaluation studies conducted by the team echoed these comments. “Parents and carers surveyed reported spending more time with their children and experiencing less stress themselves. Three quarters said the tip sheets helped them reduce physical or emotional violence,” says Jamie. “These are simple tips, but they can have a huge impact on people’s lives by helping them manage emotions, encourage positive behaviour and see the value of spending time together. Research shows that all these things not only lead to less violence towards children but between partners, too.”
Supporting families beyond the pandemic
While lockdowns may have ended for many, playful parenting remains relevant — and arguably increasingly important. While the full implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on child wellbeing are still unfolding, emerging evidence suggests it has exacerbated vulnerabilities in already disadvantaged and marginalised families and children.
The Parenting for Lifelong Health team is exploring ways to enable more communities, particularly those that are hard to reach, to access the resources. These include apps, interactive video and audio, and utilising platforms such as WhatsApp.
“These issues are not going away. Whether it’s disease outbreaks, war or natural disasters, there will be more situations where families will need support to cope,” says Lucie. “But it’s not just emergencies; everyday life after lockdown is more stressful for many, with economic crises and continued worries about mental and physical health. We need to arm parents and carers with the very best evidence-based parenting information to help protect children from violence and improve family life for everyone.”
Want to know more?
If you’re a UK taxpayer, your contributions helped fund this work via the Economic and Social Research Council and UK Research and Innovation — the UK’s largest public funder of research. You can read more about what we do here.
The Parenting for Lifelong Health programmes were developed through a collaboration between the universities of Oxford and Bangor in the UK and the universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch in South Africa, UNICEF and the World Health Organization.
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