Box 1: Core principles of the Creative Stress Relief Programme

Creativity and Play: Creativity and play are useful principles for three main reasons. First, they allow a sense of joy, aliveness and spontaneity and can therefore help to stimulate a positive and engaging atmosphere within a group. In such a setting, people may find it easier to share their stories and explore difficult emotions (Jennings et al. 1994, pp. 16–20; Richards 2010; Carson and Chowdhury 2000). Second, creativity can be seen as an important antidote to fixed educational expectations that do not necessarily bring joy through learning (as explained by Sir. Ken Robinson in his Ted Talk in 2011). Creative thinking can also promote liberation from pre-defined goals (e.g. ‘I want my child to be an engineer’) often witnessed in Indian middle-class families (Natrajan and Thomas 2002). Finally, creativity is known to stimulate problem-solving and relieve stress (Stuckey and Nobel 2010; Plucker and Dow 2010). Play should be appreciated here as a broader concept than actual ‘game playing’ and as a way to be playful, creative and humorous in everyday situations, including the disciplining and education of children. Stimulating play can also help to improve the quality of interactions between parent and child.

Self-Awareness and Bonding: Parents can find certain interactions with their children difficult (for instance, open dialogues about sexual feelings), which could be due to fears derived from their own childhood and an unresolved attachment state of mind (Lionetti et al. 2015). In attachment theories, these anxieties are often described as rooted in individuals’ IWMs. These cognitive frameworks form the foundation of parents’ expectations of their children and reactions to their behaviour (Kobak and Esposito 2004). In India, this is seen, for instance, where mothers felt they were not given enough freedom of choice and trust as they were growing up, making them more hesitant and less confident towards life in general (Singh and Bhayana 2014). In this programme, parents were invited to explore parent–adolescent bonding, particularly by focusing on their own IWMs and secure attachment narratives (Bowlby 1973). To facilitate part of this session, the psychologist used techniques that are at the basis of trauma-healing theories [such as, for instance, Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR)] to facilitate the exploration of parents’ own thoughts, beliefs and feelings (Shapiro 2001). Negative cognitions such as ‘I’m not good enough’, ‘I’m not safe’ or ‘I am not in control’, rooted in parents’ own upbringing, were analysed together and ‘healed’ by Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFTs).

Communication: Professionals considered communication as a key aspect to be included in the workshop, as inter-generational communication tends to be a notable challenge for middle-class Indian families (Natarjan et al. 2002). The methods used in other parent–child programmes were regarded as useful in stimulating positive parent–adolescent communication, such as derived from Faber and Mazlish (2004), authors of How to talk so teens will listen, and how to listen so teens will talk, and Non-Violent Communication (NVC) by Marshall Rosenberg (2003). Central to such approaches are the focus on tuning into the child’s emotional state, without aiming to consult or change it directly, and to support the child in communicating their current emotional state (Schrodt et al. 2009). In the group, a combination of such approaches was used to explore fictional as well as real-life situations of parents and children.