Abstract
Harsh parenting attitudes and behaviors negatively impact children’s behavior and development, and are linked to heightened levels of violence in children. Parent training programs are effective preventive interventions, but only reach caregivers who attend them. In this study, programs were implemented alongside a community mobilization process, intended to use caregivers’ social networks to disseminate new parenting skills community wide. We used social network analysis to explore whether this intervention, first, increased positive parenting, second, changed social networks of female caregivers (selection), and, third, influenced parenting behavior via connections (socialization), while controlling for psychiatric morbidity, parenting stress, alcohol misuse, and child’s age. “Colored” Afrikaans-speaking female caregivers (N = 235; mean age 35.92 years) in a rural community in South Africa, with children between 1½ and 18 years old, were included in the study; two waves of data were collected (January–April 2016 and June–October 2017). We detected community-wide increases in positive parenting behavior (involvement, supervision, consistent discipline, and reduced corporal punishment). Attending at least one session of a parenting skills training program (n = 51; 21.7%) significantly predicted increases in network centrality (i.e., outdegree and indegree). Caregivers appeared to use similar parenting behavior to other caregivers they were connected to within the network, especially when those others attended a parenting skills training program. Overall, the results suggest that the information in the intervention was spread throughout the community through social interactions with program attendees and the community mobilization process. The results also illustrate the value of social network analysis for ascertaining the processes by which the intervention achieved its impact.
Highlights
We started our analysis procedure by assessing whether the intervention brought about a community-wide shift towards warm, positive parenting
Parenting behavior across the community became more positive from Wave 1 to Wave 2 with scores for both the APQ and PARYC increasing from Wave 1 to Wave 2: Mw1APQ = 3.66 [95% bias-corrected, accelerated confidence interval 3.57, 3.74], Mw2APQ = 3.74 [3.66, 3.81]; Mw1PARYC = 4.80 [4.50, 5.10], Mw2PARYC = 5.09 [4.81, 5.37]
There was a mean increase over time in positive parenting practices across all caregivers in the analytic sample, irrespective of their program attendance
Summary
The intervention program in Touwsranten was aimed at promoting warmer, more positive parenting in all the individuals within this setting. Due to the community mobilization component, we hypothesized, first, that the intervention would be associated with a mean improvement in parenting practices across all caregivers in the analytic sample, irrespective of program attendance (Hypothesis 1). We hypothesized that both more positive parenting (Hypothesis 2a) and attending parenting skills training programs (Hypothesis 2b), would be associated with increased network centrality (as measured by multivariate network centrality parameters: indegree, outdegree, closeness, and betweenness). In terms of network structure, we expected that program attendance would be associated both with caregivers nominating more others to speak to about parenting (selection: covariate ego effects, Hypothesis 3a) and with caregivers being nominated by more others to speak to about parenting (consistent with a possible increase in their social influence (selection: covariate alter effects, Hypothesis 3b). We tested the hypotheses while controlling for risk factors that may undermine parenting (Nkuba et al 2018)
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