News - February 2003

Children helped through difficult transition


Starting school is a tough time for many children, as they exchange the familiarity of one environment for the uncertainties of another. Making new friends and adjusting to a new school order can be difficult challenges.

However, a study in Lithuania has shown that children who participated in the Zippy's Friends programme handled the transition from kindergarten to primary school more easily than children who did not.

Zippy's Friends teaches coping skills to six and seven year old children. In many countries, these children are in primary school but in Lithuania they are in their last year at kindergarten. Many Lithuanian parents worry that their children will find the transition to primary school traumatic.

Dr Ona Monkeviciene of the Education Development Centre in Vilnius studied 140 children who had participated in Zippy's Friends and a control group of 106 children who had not. Dr Monkeviciene and a team of student researchers from Vilnius Pedagogical University questioned teachers and parents, to assess how the children had adapted to their new environments.

Teachers were asked about:

  • How children felt in the morning during the first three months of the school year
  • How children felt at the end of the school day
  • Difficulty for the child to get used to the school order
  • If the child found friends that helped him/her not to feel lonely
  • Extent to which the child tried to overcome difficulties and solved problems by him/herself
  • If the child was successful in coping with difficulties
  • Whether the child tried to help others cope with difficulties

By all these measures, children in the experimental group integrated better than children in the control group.

Parents reported that children in the experimental group were more likely to feel cheerful in the morning when getting ready to go to school and after returning home, and had significantly less difficulty getting used to the school order.

Parents also reported that children in the experimental group had significantly fewer problems, used significantly more methods to cope with their problems and used significantly more adequate methods.

Prof Brian Mishara of the University of Quebec at Montreal, who has twice evaluated the implementation and impact of Zippy's Friends , welcomed Dr Monkeviciene's study.

'This is a powerful indication that there are differences in the behaviours of children which are sustained when they enter a new school,' he said. 'The fact that the same findings were found for parents and teachers and that there was a significant correlation between parent and teacher assessments supports the validity of the findings.'

Zippy's Friends in Lithuania is run by a local agency, Vaiko Labui. There are currently 5,160 children enrolled in the programme in 176 kindergartens nationwide, being taught by 416 specially trained teachers.