The Effect of a Parent-Based Autonomy Support Program on Children’s Self-Regulation: A Pilot

The PiP intervention will be a parent-focused program that teaches parents of pre-school children how and when to use autonomy supportive guiding behaviours during parent-child play. The PiP program will be spread across an 8-week period and consists of parent-only online knowledge sessions, parent-child in-person play workshops (held at an on-campus play space), and at-home play. Knowledge sessions are intended to educate parents to improve their understanding of self-regulation and specific autonomy supportive practices shown to have a positive impact on self-regulation development. Topics covered in these sessions include (but not limited to) definitions of SR, what behaviours are indicative of children’s regulation and SR challenge, features of autonomy supportive behaviours, how and when autonomy support can be implemented, how parents can guide children with open-ended questions and encouraging statements, and how planning can support regulation development. Knowledge sessions are 45 min to 1 hour long, and are held online via Zoom, and are recorded. All parents are invited to attend either the live session held by the lead researcher, or watch the recording prior to the in-person workshop. The knowledge sessions are held every other week, totalling 4 sessions across the 8-week period. Attendance will be recorded in contribution to fidelity data. During in-person play workshops parent-child dyads will engage in challenging play activities in which parents can practice autonomy support guiding strategies, individually coached by the researcher. The sessions are held every other week, totalling 4 sessions across the 8-week period. The session will start with a recap of the knowledge session for parents to ask any outstanding questions. The dyads will move to different play stations throughout the 90 minute workshop, culminating in a consolidation portion of the strategies while children free-play under the supervision of a research assistant. Play activities will align to characteristics that are conducive to SR growth (challenging, engaging, iterative). An example of a play activity is below: Rainbow Pebbles Activity Set: children copy structures of varying degrees of challenge with the coloured ‘pebbles’ provided. Once a structure is completed the parent will be able to guide their child toward completing another, more difficult structure. During the completion of this task parents will utilise strategies that draw inspiration from the four features of autonomy support (which also inform the weekly theme of the knowledge sessions and workshops) to include: contingency, encouragement & using a helpful tone of voice, the hierarchy of autonomy support and creating challenge (as a feature of the task design). At-home play: Parents will use these play episodes to continue to practise the principles and strategies from the online knowledge session and the in-person play workshops. Parents will be given a soft copy of a play-at-home calendar to track the time they spend engaged in parent-child play. Parents will be asked to play for a minimum of 60 minutes, every other week in between play workshops. Experiences of at-home play will be deconstructed during a reflection element of the online knowledge session that follows.