Impacts of a Support Intervention for Zimbabwean and Sudanese Refugee Parents: “I Am Not Alone”

‘Like a life in a cage’: Understanding child play and social interaction in Somali refugee families in the UK

“…Duggan et al, 2014) may be poorly attuned to communal cultural practices and limited by the stresses and isolation described so eloquently by our participants. A more communal/collective approach, helping families meet together, could provide more culturally-coordinated opportunities for both communication and interaction, as well as more confident parenting and increased wellbeing (Salami et al, 2017, Stewart et al, 2015.…”

Transnationalism and care of migrant families during pregnancy, postpartum and early-childhood: an integrative review

“…Sixteen papers (23% of the literature) focused on care, an intervention or a program during early-childhood (see Tables 3 and 4). These included: studies that examined migrant mothers' general experiences of accessing primary healthcare [52,62,79] or early-childhood programs [105] for their children; one study that explored nurses' experiences in providing primary healthcare to refugee families with a child aged 0 to 6 years [108]; papers that reported on parents and care-providers' perspectives of peer support group interventions meant to enhance parenting skills, promote child development and reduce isolation among immigrant mothers [22] and refugee mothers/parents [80,[101][102][103]; and literature that described and/or evaluated specialized earlyeducation programs for migrant and refugee families, or that investigated the experiences of educators in providing these services [60,73,76,90,98,99].…”

“…For the mixed-methods studies, one study provided inadequate details on the methods and was therefore deemed poor quality [75]; the other six were all good quality-there was a clear rationale for using mixedmethods, and the qualitative and quantitative components were sufficiently described and 'mixed' [60,88,97,[100][101][102]. Two strengths across the research, irrespective of the design, were: 1-the inclusion of minority language migrants as participants; of the 53 studies with migrant parents, 36 accommodated those speaking a language other than the host-country language; and 2-the migrant populations were generally well-described using key indicators (i.e., country of origin, length of time, and migration status).…”

“…Cultural and religious ways of belonging were attended to in various ways. These included: the use of community-based doulas, mostly other mothers from the same communities, who acted as "cultural bridges" and provided information on different cultural birthing customs [47]; hiring of a cleric to conduct religious traditions and prayers in the hospital [21]; the involvement of peers in support/community groups and programs towards enhancing social support and healthy behaviors through the sharing of knowledge [41,70,80,[90][91][92]101]; the creation and use of culturally-adapted materials including a prenatal training course [75], a psycho-education program [99], a specialized antenatal clinic [100], perinatal health education videos [68], and a mhealth application developed to support a healthy pregnancy and to connect women to services and other women in their ethnic community [48,49]; and the adaptation or tailoring of care to respond to different cultural and religious needs and expectations, for example having a female care-provider, asking about food preferences and providing culturally appropriate recommendations on prenatal nutrition, baby care, and parenting [41, 53, 54, 58, 61, 65, 78, 79, 84, 86, 92-95, 97, 98, 103, 106-108, 110].…”

“…Speaking more slowly, adjusting their words and using miming or non-verbal expression was also used when language was a challenge [77-79, 86, 91, 106, 107]. In three papers, care-providers actively encouraged families to speak their native language and to pass it on to their children [31,101,105]; in one of these, maintaining culture was also promoted [2]. And lastly, accessing care from care-providers who were from the same ethnic community was also a way for migrants to feel respected and understood in their culturally and linguistically 'ways of belonging' [52,62,74,96].…”