Intentional play as a resilience-enabling intervention for children in distress in a challenged context

The study investigated the utility of prioritised, daily play as a contextually responsive intervention to support the overwhelming number of children-in-distress in contexts of structural disparity with limited residential care spaces, few trained staff, and scarce funding for support. The convergent parallel mixed-methods case study compared overtime data on holistic developmental outcomes of 59 purposively sampled children in two residential care settings (with or without intentional play). The study found that, over time, children-in-distress who engage in intentional play demonstrated higher positive developmental outcomes across domains (physical, academic, and psychological health and well-being) in comparison to their counterparts. Findings of this study have value to promote unpredicted positive outcomes of children-in-distress in comparable, low-and-middle-income spaces with sparse resources, yet an overwhelming need for evidence-based child-care intervention.