Peaceful Resistance through Adult-Child Connections and Play

• In Event: Integrated approaches to ECD

Proposal

Palestinian territory, encompassing the Gaza Strip, West Bank, including East Jerusalem, has been illegally occupied by Israel since 1967. Palestinians are regularly exposed to violence by Israeli settlers and security forces, often leading to deadly escalations, including aerial bombardments of the Gaza Strip, under blockade for 16 years. Many communities have been pushed into poverty; nearly half a million children in Palestine require humanitarian assistance to access needs, including quality education. The protracted crisis amounts to a psychological stranglehold. Recent reports indicate that Palestinians do not suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder because their trauma is ongoing and generational.
Education is one of the primary ways in which Palestinians have resisted an apartheid state, as evidenced by high literacy rates (97.51% for adults) and enrollment rates for basic (95.4%), secondary (92.31%) and tertiary education (42.68%). This proposal is highly relevant to CIES 2024, as it showcases evidence-based research data gathered and analyzed by the research team throughout their interventions in an applied research using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, a behavioral screening for children and adolescents ages 2 through 17 years, developed by child psychiatrist Robert N. Goodman, Family Outcomes Survey, and the Crowell observation tool, created by Crowell and Feldman; to assess the parent-child relationship. Initially the team thought the research would take three-months, however due to the disruptions of raids and lockdown of camps and towns, the research took six-months. The interventions used were a modified Language Environment Analysis (LENA Start), Partners in Parenting Education curriculum, and mindfulness practices. The results present possible interventions that can support children and their families living in precarious or conflict areas on their path to liberation. One of the outputs of the research is a series of interventions to increase positive-shared-emotional-interactions between parents and children. This reduces the stress response of the parents with their children, offers a pause to the continual fear and unpredictability families live in, and perhaps offers a way to start addressing generational trauma. The interventions (education) provided opportunities for parents to find agency, bringing attention to their own state and understanding how that impacts the children’s growth and development. Parents are better able to make intentional choices interacting with their children.
In the context of conflict, children with parents who have experienced or witnessed trauma may be at an increased risk of poor mental health and wellbeing outcomes. In Palestine, as a result of settler colonialism, families live in unpredictable conditions, are exposed to violence and have limited or no access to basic needs, including protection, health, mental health, education, employment, shelter, etc. Families desperately wish to learn but do not necessarily have access to educational services. Study interventions provided families with parenting support through education of awareness of their own emotional state, their interactions with their children, and simple strategies to increase positive shared emotional interactions with their children, decreasing the impact of living in an ongoing emergency setting. Interventions provided the moms ways to pause the stress, become more present, and intentionally provide a nurturing connection through play and interaction, inventing ways of adapting to their condition and increase internal available resources” (Parent3, 2023).

Research team can support other parents and family educators, clinicians, and child care practitioners working in precarious contexts in understanding how to increase positive-shared-emotional-interactions between caregiver and child during conflict, camps, and natural disasters. Many of the conflicts and current natural disasters are from the larger effects from economic capitalist paradigm and colonialism. Researchers hope to inspire vulnerable/high risk groups to try similar intervention techniques or strategies. Successful stories from Palestine can help shift the existing narrative and share stories to the world different from what the dominant narrative they hear in the media. Palestinians are determined to present in their resistance an eagerness to learn and live peacefully, and address their concerns of their children's wellbeing and mental health for a hopeful future, which is a shared concern of the children world wide.

We would have better planned for the disruptions due to raids, lockdowns, and demolitions. We would expand the program to include fathers working with the whole family. We will research more for tools that may be better situated for families living in ongoing emergency settings. It is important to develop an intervention/program for dealing with the effects of anxiety as a result of military detentions of children, separating them from their families. Researchers noted that parents did not have the tools to explain the realities of occupation to their younger children, which prompted children to internalize the meaning of the occupation. However, when parents learned how to discuss said issues, their lines of communication opened up, increasing moments of joy between parent and child. We used EC Prism to find tools in Arabic. We chose our interventions based on the expertise and training of the research team members.

The project influenced parent/child interactions. Family members reported they wanted to learn and experience the same joy moms were experiencing and meet researchers in person. Moms reported a more positive engagement with their children, a change in the child’s development seen in their expression and regulation of their emotions, the ways in which moms comforted their children shifted to be more open and communicative about the realities of their lives in developmentally appropriate ways. During interventions moms were taught mindfulness practices to do for themselves and with their young children. Moms learned how to engage in play in more interactive ways and were provided tools to support their child’s self-regulation through parent modeling and conversation. Moreover, moms disclosed that they became less stressful and nervous since joining the intervention program. Learning to pause, using their newly-acquired tools and skills to notice their own stress levels and using mindfulness skills and play to rest their nervous system. The majority of parents recognized the extent the impact of occupation has had on their well-being and on parenting, impacting their relationships with their children and their children’s mental health and wellbeing.

Authors

• Deborah Young, Empowering Communities Globally: For the Care of Children

• Rasha Shakhshir, An Najah National University