Supporting Parent and Child Engagement

The COVID-19 pandemic and measures aimed at reducing the spread of the virus have created unique challenges and stresses for Canadian families. Balancing work, family, and daily life has become extremely difficult for many families. Economic uncertainty is widespread as many parents are dealing with increased demands such as working from home, running the household, and homeschooling and caring for their children without the support of their social networks. Recent findings from a study on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on young families conducted by our lab found that parents reported increased levels of stress, difficulties in following through with their parenting duties, and challenges managing their children's behaviour. Accessible programs are urgently needed to help parents cultivate supportive family relationships during and in recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic as physical distancing and public health requirements have further decreased the accessibility of existing programming. The proposed research aims to test the relative value of multiple light-touch parenting supports (developed through the REB-approved BRIDGE program, NCT04347707 and NCT04639557) in a 2-arm randomized control trial including behaviour management and emotion-focused strategies delivered through psychoeducational parenting videos, structured family activities, and an online parenting support group. The investigators plan to evaluate the efficacy of this program at reducing parenting stress (primary outcome) and promoting family well-being (secondary outcomes).

Supportive parent-child relationships are increasingly understood to be the single most important predictor of resilient child development because they shape children's ability to build relationships and navigate the world around them. The emergence of emotion regulation skills during the preschool years serves as a key step in adaptive trajectories through which children learn to communicate their needs, engage in prosocial behaviour, and prepare for learning opportunities at school and beyond. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has placed striking pressure on parents' capacities to engage in consistently supportive interactions due to factors such as limited childcare, financial strain, and poor mental health, which each present risks for child development. The team of investigators designed the SPACE Program (Supporting Parent And Child Emotional well-being) to directly and immediately respond to family needs, with the potential for long-term impacts through its highly scalable approach. SPACE brings together best practices in emotion-focused parenting in a format guided by our Parent Advisory Board and over 1000 families who described their unmet needs in our rapid-response Parenting During the Pandemic survey. SPACE includes the provision of materials (i.e., psychoeducational videos and hands-on emotion-focused activities) alongside a virtual and interactive, facilitator-led parenting group to re-enforce skill acquisition and provide social support. The investigators' mixed-methods assessments are designed to understand the impacts of SPACE across multiple indicators of family function. The long-term goal is to create an accessible evidence-based online parenting program to promote child emotional development and well-being. There are three objectives for the SPACE parenting project: 1. Assess the benefits of the novel SPACE program on parenting stress and parenting quality compared to services as usual (SAU): free provincial parenting resource guides and parenting sheets. 2. Determine the extent to which the SPACE program impacts child emotion-regulation development and if this relationship is mediated by parents' emotional and behavioural change. 3. Identify baseline factors linked to differential efficacy of SPACE. Hypothesis: SPACE will have higher efficacy for improving outcomes for children who a) identify as girls, b) exhibit higher cognitive performance, and c) exhibit greater cardiac flexibility.