Do Playful Parents Raise Playful Children? A Mixed Methods Study to Explore the Impact of Parental Playfulness on Children’s Playfulness

ABSTRACT

Research Findings: Playfulness is an important personality tendency with an important role in the well-being, mental health, and various other aspects of an individual’s life. Previous studies have shown that the development of children’s playfulness is related to parents’ playfulness. However, limited research has been conducted on how parental playfulness influences children’s playfulness. The present study used a mixed-methods design to examine the impact of parents’ playfulness on their children’s playfulness and explore the mechanism of the impacting process. Questionnaires were administered to participants, who comprised 360 parents of preschool children, to test the relationship between parental and children’s playfulness and explore the roles of parenting styles and parent-child relationships as the quantitative element of the study. The qualitative element comprised semi-structured interviews with 10 parents selected from the quantitative part. The results suggest that there was significant positive correlation between parental and children’s playfulness and democratic parenting and intimate parent-child relationships had a chain mediating effect on this relationship. Further, parents’ attitudes toward playfulness, constraints on children’s play, and parental support for children in play were also the factors that influence the relationship between parental and children’s playfulness. Practice or Policy: These findings provide approaches of interventions aimed at cultivating a higher level of playfulness, and simultaneously promoting the overall development of children.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the families who participated in the study and the kindergartens that provided generous help in data collection. Furthermore, we would like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their comments on our manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The quantitative and qualitative datasets used in the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Consent to Participate

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Chinese Ministry of Education of Humanities and Social Science project [Grant No. 18YJC880090].