Experience of Mentoring through Acquisition of Positive Parenting Skills in Children’s Daily Care Centres

The current article reveals mentorship experiences of helping parents to develop their skills of positive parenting in children’s daily care centres (CDCC). Mentors for parents (social pedagogues and social workers) are perceived as persons enabling parents to manage the situations of children’s education applying positive parenting skills and observing the principles of positive parenting. The current article analyses CDC, which are in the process of developing their functions and traditions on the social scale. The object of the research is mentoring experience of specialists working in CDC to help parents, whose children attend daily care centres, develop their positive parenting skills. The purpose of the study is to reveal the experiences of CDC social workers and social pedagogues of working with parents, whose children attend daily care centres, seeking to develop their positive parenting skills. The study questions: 1) What possibilities are provided to parents to acquire positive parenting skills in CDC? 2) What are the experiences of parents’ mentorship seeking for the development of their positive parenting skills? Qualitative research type was chosen for the study. In the study, the method of a semistructured interview, which enables to come close to the understanding of human experiences, designation of meanings, the definition of meanings and the construction (explanation) of reality, was used. The obtained data were analysed by the content analysis method. Qualitative content analysis was carried out in accordance with the inductive, study data based and categories composed logic. According to J. W. Creswell (2009), content analysis is a technique which, having examined the specificities of the text, allows, objectively and systematically, draw reliable conclusions. The qualitative content analysis was performed regarding the following sequence (Creswell, 2009): repeated reading of the content of transcript interview texts, distinction of meaning elements in the text analysed, grouping of the distinguished meaning elements into categories and sub-categories, integration of the categories/sub-categories into the context of the phenomenon analysed and description of their analysis. Criteria-based sample was used in the study. The informants were chosen according to the following criteria: 1) a social worker or social pedagogues with higher education, 2) specialists that help parents, whose children attend CDC, develop positive parenting skills, 3) mentoring experience of not less than 2 years. Selecting the research participants, the snowball principle was observed, when the informants were asked to indicate other CDC specialists having mentoring experience. The study was conducted in October-December 2016. 9 informants participated in the research (5 social pedagogues and 4 social workers). The results of the qualitative research on the development of positive parenting skills in CDC revealed that parents were provided with a possibility to develop positive parenting skills in the organised courses/seminars, open lectures and individual consultations. Parents’ self-support groups, individual consultations and different available literature offered by CDC specialists created preconditions for (self-) development of parenting skills through cooperation-based interrelationships with own children. However, a part of the informants were inclined to render responsibility for their children’s development to CDC specialists rather than assume it themselves. A part of the research participants would like to attend training courses more often, yet they were unable to do so due to working or family conditions as they did not have anybody to leave younger children with. The analysis of the research results revealed that the welfare of children attending daily care centres necessitated for the development of parents’ positive parenting skills, which helped parents to positively communicate and cooperate with own children, to establish harmonious interrelationships and spend time together. The general competences acquired by parents (transferable skills) enabled a family to live more harmoniously, gave children an opportunity to observe parents’ positive behaviour and develop positive parenting skills through a harmonious participation in family life.