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Playful Parent
Children with disabilities tend to be less playful than their typically developing peers and are at higher risk for play deprivation due to disability-specific challenges associated with interacting with the environment. Parents play a crucial role in promoting children’s play through shaping the home play environment, arranging outside-home play opportunities, engaging with children in play, and modeling playfulness themselves. While numerous play interventions, including many involving parents as co-implementors, focus on teaching play skills to children with disabilities, few have explored ways to help parents become more playful play partners and facilitators. Play interventions targeting adult caregivers are the key to unlocking the under-tapped potential of parental playfulness. Designed as a companion program to OSU's IMPACT, the Playful Parent project aims to develop and evaluate a novel parent-focused play intervention to enhance playfulness in parents of children with disabilities. If you are interested in learning more about this project, including getting involved as a participant or a student research assistant, please contact Dr. Shen at sharon.shen@oregonstate.edu. |
View Supporting Resources for Playful Parenting
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Play2Cope
COVID-19 has impacted individual and family lives far and wide. The prolonged pandemic has caused sustained stress and impacts on mental health in particular. Existing COVID-19 studies on mental health emphasized risk factors, vulnerabilities, and adverse psychiatric outcomes. Individual efforts, resources, and adaptive behaviors that contributed to resilient coping with positive outcomes are relatively less studied. The Play2Cope project (a) provided a rapid snapshot of health and well-being across the whole U.S. population and in specific vulnerable groups beyond the initial stage of the COVID-19 pandemic; (b) explored how patterns of free-time activities, particularly physical activity and outdoor recreation interacted with risk factors and other protective factors and contributed to individual and family’s resilient coping; and (c) profiled resilient coping among caregivers/families of children with or without disabilities to detect factors that may lead to effective intervention for this vulnerable group. For more information about this study, please contact Dr. Shen at sharon.shen@oregonstate.edu. Read our latest publication from this project: Leisure Engagement during COVID-19 and Its Association with Mental Health and Wellbeing in U.S. Adults |
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Virtual Park Ranger
Screen time has been criticized for pulling children away from nature. However, innovative use of technology can help enable and augment children's contact and connections with nature. In the Virtual Park Ranger (VPR) project, our lab works with a multi-disciplinary research team in health, multimedia technology, community outreach, and outdoor education to co-develop a smartphone application to enhance school-aged children's outdoor experience. The project partners with Oregon’s Outdoor School Program to co-design and test the VPR application. If you are interested in learning more about this project, please visit the VPR website. If you would like to partner with the VPR team to design technology-assisted outdoor experiences for your program, please contact Siew Sun Wong at siewsun.wong@oregonstate.edu. |
Visit VPR website
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The Assessment of Adult Play and Playfulness
Play and playfulness in adults have been connected with a wide range of indicators of human performance, health, and well-being. The validity of growing functional studies of play and playfulness rests, to a large degree, on the use of sound assessments of the two key constructs. We have conducted systematic psychometric studies to develop and validate the assessment of the playful disposition (i.e., the individual attribute), playful engagement (i.e., the experiential quality of playful behavior), and key conditions pertinent to the player-envioronment interactions. All scales are freely available for research and educational uses (visit the project page for more info). If you are interested in using any of these scales in your work or translating them into a different language, please contact Dr. Shen at sharon.shen@oregonstate.edu. |
"We don't stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing." --George Bernard Shaw
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Play2IMPACT
Although there has been continued increase of play-based interventions designed to foster child development, the majority of existing programs focus on the technical aspects of programming (e.g., teaching specific skills) and often overlook the “playful” quality of children’s experience, leading to “play-like” activities that may not be as effective in generating benefits associated with intrinsically motivated and highly engaged play. The purpose of the Play2IMPACT project is to develop an assessment of the playfulness of children's activities and refocus play interventions on the quality of play engagement by working with Oregon State University's IMPACT (Individualized Movement and Physical Activity for Children Today ) program. Note: this project was redirected due to the onset of COVID-19. Interested researchers are welcomed to contact Dr. Shen for opportunities to collaborate on this research initiative. |
Visit the IMPACT program
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