Parental mindfulness: Self-directed intervention for children's mental health

Children's mental health has significant long-term impacts not only for the children and young people themselves, but also their families and wider society (Parsonage, Khan & Saunders, 2014). Parental mental ill-health and poor executive control can negatively impact their parenting, and is therefore important to children's wellbeing. Mindfulness interventions have been demonstrated to be useful in improving mental health and executive control, but a lot of the evidence comes from outside the parenting domain. Furthermore, traditional interventions aimed at parents do not reach many of the families who need it, largely due to cost and accessibility barriers (Gardner et al., 2017).

Therefore, this project proposes investigate the associations between parental mindfulness and children's mental health and well-being outcomes, as well as to evaluate the effectives of a mindfulness smartphone app (Headspace - collaborative partner in the project) in improving parents' executive control.

The potential benefits from conducting this research are that an evidence-base is provided for the delivery of mindfulness interventions via the inexpensive and accessible Headspace app, which may be useful to help parents improve their mental health and executive control which in turn might improve their children's wellbeing, resulting in benefits for both the family and society in the long-term.