Call for Curricula: Contribute to the Common Elements Project

Identifying Common Elements in Parenting Programmes for Supporting Children and Caregivers in Early and Middle Childhood

A public good to benefit the global parenting support community

The Global Initiative to Support Parents (GISP) is supporting the development of a public good.

This research project is being led by Dr. Aisha K. Yousafzai from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in collaboration with GISP partners and ECDAN, and supported by the LEGO Foundation.

Project Background

In the last decade, there have been increased investments in research, programs, and policies to support parenting. However, the parenting intervention landscape is diverse, encompassing a wide range of programs designed to:

Achieve different goals, including reducing child maltreatment, reducing child behavioral problems, promoting cognitive and social emotional development, promoting school readiness, reducing parenting stress and depressive symptoms, and supporting caregiver-child interactions.
Optimize specific delivery modalities, including home visits, community groups, and clinic settings.
Focus on specific populations, including children with disabilities, malnourished children, and caregivers with depression.

Selecting which parenting intervention will meet desired goals and be effective and feasible in a new setting and population is challenging. Adaptations and modifications are necessary as we scale up, transport to a new culture, or integrate in a new system.

Project Purpose

The Common Elements Project aims to produce a public good that can help to select, adapt, and tailor a parenting curriculum to meet the needs of each community.

This project team will review parenting curricula to identify common elements in parenting interventions that drive successful outcomes, can support adaptations, and improve effectiveness and feasibility.

Common elements include common parenting messages (e.g., play activities to promote learning, ways to manage difficult behaviors), behavior change techniques (e.g., coaching, problem-solving), and strategies for training and supporting frontline workers (e.g., role-playing, group supervision).

The project will then create profiles of the common elements, organized by the goal, modality, and population.

Participate in the Common Elements Project

The project team has conducted a systematic review of reviews to identify evidence-based parenting interventions for caregivers of children in early and middle childhood.

We are reaching out to request your parenting curriculum so we can review the content to identify common elements across all the parenting interventions we have identified. Your curriculum will not be rated or critiqued. Our purpose is to look at common features across all parenting curricula.

Your parenting curricula can be written in any language.
We will review your curriculum to identify “common elements”—that is, characteristics or drivers of success shared with other curricula.
We will then create profiles specific to each common element to help end users understand its value (e.g., coaching caregiver-child interactions), provide examples of curricula where it is incorporated, and outline the parenting intervention goals it can support.
The common elements profiles will be shared as a public good.

In addition to supporting this common good, we would like your permission to either share your curriculum in an eventual online open-access platform, provide links to sites where the curriculum may already be hosted, or share relevant access information.

This project is supported by the LEGO Foundation and the Early Childhood Development Action Network.

Project Oversight

Dr. Aisha K. Yousafzai will lead the project and the project team will be supported by a technical advisory group and a stakeholder advisory group.

She has extensive experience in evaluating early childhood interventions in south Asia, east Africa, and in central and east Europe.

Dr. Yousafzai has written extensively about early childhood interventions in low- and middle-income countries including recent articles in Annals of the New York Academy of Science, Annual Review of Psychology, Lancet, Lancet Global Health, and Pediatrics.

Additional information on Dr. Yousafzai’s background and research is available via her Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health profile:

https://hsph.harvard.edu/profile/aisha-khizar-yousafzai/

Project Launch

On September 26th 2024, during GISP’s Townhall, Dr Aisha Yousafzai launched the Common Elements Project, a comprehensive study aimed at identifying essential components of effective parenting interventions.

Next steps

If you are willing to share your parenting curricula, please complete this form.

For any inquiries, please contact Sarala Tiwari: saralatiwari@hsph.harvard.edu