Effectiveness Of An International Mental Health Promotion Programme For Young Children: A Study In Shanghai

Nowadays, it's quite important and urgent to conduct early childhood mental health education in China. But it is rare to find useful theoretical and practical resources for teachers. And, actually, both teachers and parents pay little attention to education in this field. In this situation, Zippy's Friends, a school-based programme for promoting young children's mental health was introduced to Shanghai kindergartens by some research institutes in 2006. This global programme has been running in many countries and has become the first systematic mental health promotion curriculum in Chinese kindergartens. Shanghai is the first district to have this programme in Mainland China. The effects of this programme in Shanghai are analyzed and discussed here. The goals being to: examine effectiveness, determine extension feasibility throughout China, draw more attention to early childhood mental health, and supply research conclusions to the field of early childhood mental health education.By using both the quantitative and qualitative methods, the impacts on children are first examined in different but inter-supportive levels. The curriculum's impacts on teachers and parents are also explored through a qualitative analysis. In order to have a deeper insight into the effects of the programme in Shanghai, the reasons for its effectiveness and several important issues are discussed. Some of the effects/feedback in Shanghai and other countries are compared throughout the discussion.Combining all of the analysis and discussions, this study draws some conclusions and proposes several suggestions for Zippy's Friends programme and mental health education for 5-6-year-old children in China and around the world: implementing Zippy's Friends in Shanghai is successful, effective and worthy of extending to more Chinese kindergartens; it is quite necessary to conduct early childhood mental health education in China, which can not only have positive influences on children, but also profound and immediate social significance in a more extensive range; three focuses in Zippy's Friends (emotion, social skills and coping strategies) can be borrowed by Chinese school-based practice in promoting 5-6-year-old children's mental health, and it will be more effective to include and combine all the focuses than only have one of them; in the current situation, providing a mature and systematic curriculum for kindergartens is a more constructive approach to promote the practice in Chinese early childhood mental heath education; in China, it is valuable, feasible and effective to help young children understand the concept of death and learn how to cope with it; worldwide mental health education for young children can have some common elements, but considering the ecological factors such as culture, global curriculum in this field needs to be adapted during its implementation; etc.