Tele-Wellness-støttet app for familiehjemsleverandører og familier for å fremme helse, familieengasjement og skoleberedskap midt i covid-19

There is only one arm in this study. All recruited and consented participants will fill out a pre-survey, engage with the digital toolkit for 15 weeks, then fill out a post-survey.

Parents will provide their child(ren) access to a smartphone, tablet, or computer for approximately 30 minutes, three times per week for 15 weeks with a total dosage of instruction of about 22.5 hours. Parents and providers will receive self-care, parenting, and parent engagement tips and resources through push notifications twice a day. Additionally, daily reminders will be sent to parents through push notification to give their child(ren) access to the learning games. After 15 weeks of app engagement, the providers and parents will be contacted by the PI to notify them of the 15 week time mark and provide the information for post-surveys via Qualtrics.

Family Child Care Home Providers & Parents: Perceived Stress Scale (PSS)-10 is a 10-item tool widely used to measure the degree to which circumstances in one's life are deemed as stressful in the general population. The PSS was designed for use in community samples with at least a junior high school education. The items are easy to understand, and the response alternatives are simple to grasp. Six items of the PSS-10 are negatively phrased (item 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 10; negative perception subscale, while the remaining four (item 4, 5, 7 and 8; positive perception subscale) are positively phrased items and require reverse coding. Total PSS-10 score will be calculated by summing scores. A total score ranges 0-40 where a higher score indicates higher perceived stress.

Family Child Care Home Providers & Parents: Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) Informational Support Short Form 8a assesses the perceived availability of helpful information or advice. It is an 8-item tool and each item has 5 response options ranging in values from one to five-1=Never 2=Rarely 3=Sometimes 4=Usually 5=Always with a range of 8-40. Total raw scores, sum of values to responses, will be calculated. A Score conversion table found in the Appendix of the tool will be used to translate the total raw score or pro-rated score into a T-score for each participant. The T-score rescales the raw score into a standardized score with a mean of 50 and a standard deviation (SD) of 10.

Family Child Care Home providers will be asked in the pre/post-surveys whether they are aware of the existence of the Maryland Early Childhood Family Engagement Framework and Toolkit- a 91-page document developed by the Maryland State Department of Education to guide child care providers in best practices for family engagement. Family Child Care Home providers will respond either

i. Yes, I am aware of it but have not read it ii. Yes, I am aware of it and have read the report iii. No, I am not aware of it

The social, emotional, and behavioral functioning in children will be assessed by parents responding to items on the Social Competence and Behavior Evaluation for Children: The Short Form (SCBE)-30. It is a 30 item tool with a 6 point response option- Never (1), Sometimes (2 or 3), Often (4 or 5), or Always (6). The SCBE-30 has three subscales (10 items each): Anger-Aggression (cronbach's α = 0.93 in the current sample), Anxiety-Withdrawal (cronbach's α = 0.87), and Social Competence (cronbach's α = 0.89). The SCBE-30 was developed for children from ages three to six and has been shown to have high interrater and test-retest reliability and internal consistency. Sums of each subscale will be calculated.

Family Child Care Home Provider and Parents: The Supportive Parent-Caregiver Relationship Sub-scale from Scales Measuring Aspects of Child-Care Quality Supportive Parent-Caregiver Relationship assess the perceived quality of the Parent-Child Care Relationship. The provider report contains 6 items with a 5 point response scale-1=Never, 2=Rarely, 3=Sometimes, 4=Often, or 5=Always. The scale will be adapted to ask about the general relationship to all parents, not any specific parent. The parent report contains 6 items with a 5 point response scale-1=Never, 2=Rarely, 3=Sometimes, 4=Often, or 5=Always. The mean score & alpha will be reported. Reported Mean=26.9, SD=3.4, Alpha=.84)