The Need to Get Caregiver Involvement Right: A Closer Look at Caregiver Well-being When Designing Educational Programming in Protracted Crisis

• In Event: The Positive Influence of Caregiver Well-being on Child Well-being: What’s Play Got to Do With it?

Proposal

The critical role of caregivers in promoting children’s development, education, and protection in contexts of adversity has been well established. Children’s resilience to adversity is achieved when protective factors – particularly stable and committed relationships with supportive caregivers – outweigh other risks (Center on the Developing Child, 2015). It is equally known that caregivers’ own well-being influences their ability to provide responsive care that is critical for children’s holistic development (Moving Minds Alliance, January 2023, Tol et al., 2008). Therefore, caregiver well-being is of crucial importance for healthy child holistic development (Moving Minds Alliance, 2022). Yet it seems that (in protracted crisis settings) caregivers’ own well-being and experienced daily stressors are not getting the attention it needs in our programming.


A formative study, conducted in 2022-2023, into child-caregiver interactions in Imvepi refugee settlement in Uganda aimed to better understand the possibility of caregivers to be actively engaged in an educational intervention focusing on Learning Through Play (LTP) as a pedagogical methodology at school. The quantitative data of 1000 respondents (500 children, 500 primary caregivers) gains insight into the relationship between caregivers’ own well-being and the child-caregiver relationship, parenting behaviour and perceptions of their role in their child’s holistic development. The study, in addition, also gained qualitative insight (through focus group discussions with 29 caregivers and validation of results with 90 caregivers) in caregivers’ perspectives on which role they can play in the education of their children as well as give their perceptions on daily factors influencing their ability to be the nurturing, responsive and protective caregivers they want to be. When caregivers are asked about their perceptions, they indicate that education and supporting their children’s education is on top of their minds (and concerns) as it is the key for a better future. However, numerous factors related to security, uncertainty and basic livelihood cause high levels of stress and often prevent them from living up to this important caregiver task. The experienced daily hassles and long-term stress clashes with the roles that humanitarian programs assume caregivers can play in supporting children’s education.

When reflecting on the abovementioned results it is clear that, in order for caregivers to be able to engage in programming for their children, they themselves need to be feeling well. Therefore, caregivers themselves should be considered an objective of our programs and not merely as means to an end. If they are not, we (the humanitarian sector) are ignoring a key target group that contributes to success (of educational programming). It is time to get it right and make the support for caregivers themselves an objective in our programming and provide them with the proper attention and support they deserve.

Author

• Eva Sophia Smallegange, War Child Holland