Enhancing family wellness through parallel parent-child mindfulness intervention in a migrant community: A pilot study

Abstract

Background and objective: China’s urbanization has led to over 290 million workers and 35 million children to relocate from their rural homes to cities. These migrant families experience significant stress due to their socioeconomic challenges. Children of migrant workers also present higher emotional and behavioral problems than their peers (Hu et al., 2014; Wong et al., 2007). Mindfulness has been found to reduce stress and enhance emotional regulation among children and adults respectively (Coatsworth et al., 2010; de Bruin et al., 2015). Yet few mindfulness-based interventions have been conducted with parents and children concurrently (van der Oord et al., 2012), although parenting stress and child emotional difficulties are closely inter-related (Deater-Deckard et al., 2016). This study tests the effectiveness of a community-based parallel mindfulness intervention on migrant child and parental functioning in Shenzhen, China. The hypotheses were: Eight weeks of parallel mindfulness parent-child intervention will significantly reduce parenting stress and child behavioral problems, while increasing parent interpersonal mindfulness and child mindfulness. Method: Twenty-two migrant families were recruited through a community organization in Shenzhen. For each family, one child aged 6-12 and a parent joined the study. Using a quasi-experimental design, 10 families were assigned to a service-as-usual group; 12 families who were available throughout the 8 weeks were assigned to an intervention group, who joined eight weekly 2-hour mindful parenting sessions (conducted via Zoom due to Covid). Meanwhile, eight weekly 1-hour child intervention group was held in the community organization, where children watched a 20-minute mindfulness cartoon series, followed by guided brief mindfulness practice. Data were collected through a pretest and a posttest. The outcome measures included: child mindfulness (Child and Adolescent Mindfulness Measure), child behavior (parent-reported Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire), parenting stress (Parenting Stress Index), and mindful parenting (Interpersonal Mindfulness in Parenting scale). Participants were also invited to share their experiences through a post-intervention interview. Given the non-normal distribution of the change scores and the small sample size, the non-parametric alternative of paired t-test (Wilcoxon signed-rank test) was used to compare outcome changes over time; adjusted effect sizes (calculated by posttest Hedge’s g minus pretest Hedge’s g) were compared between groups. Results: The signed-rank test showed that parenting stress was marginally significantly reduced for the intervention group (z=1.65, p=.098), particularly for the parenting difficulty dimension (z=1.88, p=.061), while control group showed no significant change. However, parental interpersonal mindfulness, child mindfulness, and child behavior did not show significant changes over time. The adjusted Hedge’s g was 0.06 for parenting stress, 0.46 for parent interpersonal mindfulness, -0.21 for child mindfulness, and -0.48 for child behavioral problems. The qualitative interviews suggested that while parents overall experienced enhanced emotional awareness and emotional regulation during parent-child interactions, they expected to need continued self-practice to achieve further improvements. Implications: This study suggests the applicability and the initial evidence of effectiveness of a parallel parent-child mindfulness intervention on reducing parenting stress in Chinese migrant families. The findings call for future research with larger samples and family interventions with this under-served population.