Enhancing Parental Wellbeing: The Effects of a Character Strengths Intervention on Parental Wellbeing, Self-Efficacy, Satisfaction and Stress

Background: Parental wellbeing is key to flourishing families, yet research into how to enhance parental wellbeing is limited. Character strengths interventions have been shown to be successful with general adult samples, but research into parental strength deployment is scarce. This study aimed to investigate the effects of a two-week, self-administered character strengths intervention on four components of parental wellbeing.

Methods: A within-subject repeated measures design was used to explore the effect of the intervention on the self-reported subjective wellbeing, self-efficacy, satisfaction, and stress of parents. No control group was used. The sample for this quasi-experimental study consisted of 31 parents of primary-school-aged children from the general population, recruited primarily in the UK.

Results: Participants experienced a statistically significant increase in parental wellbeing and self-efficacy, but no significant reduction in parental stress. Parental satisfaction was high at both pre- and post-intervention, and the increase at post-intervention was small yet statistically significant. As expected, parents with low baseline self-efficacy experienced a greater increase in self-efficacy post-intervention than parents with high baseline self-efficacy. However, baseline self-efficacy levels did not affect the increase in wellbeing participants experienced.

Discussion: This study suggests that self-administered character strengths interventions can achieve positive effects in a parenting context, as they can enhance the subjective wellbeing, satisfaction and self-efficacy of parents.

Conclusion: The findings inform researchers and practitioners about the capacity of self-administered character strengths interventions to promote the wellbeing and self-efficacy of parents from the general population, thus highlighting this as a worthwhile area of further study.

This is a pre-publication version of the following article: Devexhiu, N., & Baskurt, A. B. (2024). Enhancing Parental Wellbeing: The Effects of a Character Strengths Intervention on Parental Wellbeing, Self-Efficacy, Satisfaction and Stress. European Journal of Applied Positive Psychology, 8, 5, 1-13. https://www.nationalwellbeingservice.org/volumes/volume-8-2024/volum...