There is growing international recognition of the need to promote children’s social and emotional skills as part of their overall health and wellbeing. Children need to have skills such as managing strong emotions, setting and achieving goals, managing conflicts, dealing with change, developing coping strategies, navigating relationships with peers and adults. To build and support these skills, there has been an emphasis within schools on the adoption of social and emotional learning programmes. There is now a substantive body of international evidence that these programmes can lead to long term benefits for children including improved mental health, social functioning, academic performance and positive health behaviours.
It is well established that parents play a significant role in children’s social and emotional learning. Developing social and emotional skills requires a collaboration between the school and home as these are two of the key social contexts within which social and emotional skills are developed. The majority of work on engaging parents in children’s social and emotional development has focused on traditional methods such as face-to-face group-based parenting programmes. Although, a number of these programmes have demonstrated significant improvements for children and parents, there are several issues around engaging parents including psychological barriers such as stigma, lack of confidence, or concern about being judged and practical issues such as transport to, childcare, financial difficulties, inconvenient timing. In addition, the majority of parenting interventions address behavioural problems and conduct disorders as opposed to enhancing children’s competencies. EMPOWER sought to address these issues by developing an online application aimed at enhancing parental engagement in the development of children’s social and emotional competencies. EMPOWER adopted a systematic approach to developing an evidence-based intervention. An online application aimed at supporting parental engagement introduces simplicity, convenience, accessibility and affordability to a largely untapped area of research.
