Inspiring Joy- 2020 Joyful Together® Highlights

Arab mom and dad playing with blocks, laughing with their young son.

Inspiring Joy- 2020 Joyful Together® Highlights

During the past year, Joyful Together® has grown and thrived. This model developed by OhioGuidestone’s Institute of Family & Community Impact (IFCI) infuses play and joy into everyday moments. Despite the struggles of 2020 and 2021, we have seen families and caregivers embrace joy with their children, in ways both new and old. Inspiring joy through love, play, and care in a time of uncertainty and stress not only helps get us through the tough times. It also helps build a brighter future.

As we look back at the past year and ahead to the future, we are excited to continue inspiring joy far and wide. In a society that can often feel overwhelming, incorporating joy in the day-to-day could be a way for us as individuals, families, and communities to reclaim our happiness and connection to others.

OhioGuidestone Joyful Together staff member inspiring joy in her client through a Joyful Together activity.

What Is Joyful Together®?

Above all, Joyful Together® is founded on the simple idea that care + play = joy. In the model, caregivers infuse play into everyday moments, helping to build childhood resiliency and lower parent stress. Thus, play and joy are key to preventing and combatting the adverse effects of toxic stress and trauma.

It is an evidence-based, caregiver-implemented, and play-centered model, created with and for families with young children. It’s simple and effective, specifically designed to help kids, their caregivers, and their communities thrive.

The best part about Joyful Together® is that it can be used in any situation where an adult is providing care or services to a child. We’ve adapted the basic model for all kinds of homes, daycares, early learning centers, elementary schools, and beyond.

Joyful Together is Now an Evidence-Based Practice

The Ohio Children’s Trust Fund (OCTF), Ohio’s Prevent Child Abuse America Chapter, recently announced Joyful Together® as an evidence-based practice.

Joyful Together® ECE Pilot

Young white boy laughing on the couch with joy.

In partnership with the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University and with funding from the Hemera Foundation, IFCI recently completed a Frontiers of Innovation (FOI) Joyful Together® pilot project that equipped early childhood education (ECE) professionals in Cuyahoga County with the tools to improve the quantity and quality of joyful interactions with young children in their care.

This pilot study demonstrated success in every outcome we sought to impact, including:

Lower teacher stress;
Increased teacher applied understanding of the role of play and relationships in early childhood;
And increased childhood protective factors.

The IFCI team soon will present on some of our experiences from this pilot project at an FOI Fast-Cycle Iteration Workshop, led by the Center on the Developing Child.

Inspiring Joy Nationally and Locally

Within the last year, Joyful Together® was featured at national conferences for the Society for Prevention Research and the Association of Maternal & Child Health Programs (AMCHP).

The model and its research outcomes to date also were presented to the Ohio Children’s Behavioral Health Prevention Network Stakeholder Group earlier this year.

Furthermore, we are developing a partnership with the Ohio Department of Health to train home visiting professionals in the model.

Inspiring Joy Through Our Products

Cover of The Institute of Family & Community Impact's Joyful Together Parent book.

We recently published two new Joyful Together® books: one for parents, and one for professionals in early childhood education (ECE).

Joyful Together: Using Everyday Moments to Build a Loving Relationship with Your Child helps guide parents through Joyful Together® activities, as well as background on why joy and play are vital for child brain development.

Meanwhile, our ECE version of the Joyful Together® manual provides much-needed context for implementing the Joyful model in early learning centers, giving tools for ECE professionals to use in their work with infants, toddlers, and preschoolers.

What’s Next?

Joyful Together® now is embedded into our suite of innovations for parents, children, and families, including new interventions for parental depression during the perinatal period.

Because Joyful Together® incorporates everyday life into its model, it helps foster joy in ways that are culturally responsive, focused on social and concrete supports, and cognizant of the realities of economic hardship, racism, discrimination, and marginalization experienced by many of the families we work with.

While the model alone cannot solve these problems, it can help give parents of young children a renewed sense of playfulness and joy and reduce some of the worst effects of toxic stress.

Inspiring Joy in ECE Centers

After completing our first study of Joyful Together® in early childhood education (ECE) centers, we soon will be expanding this project into six more sites.

This expanded project has been made possible thanks to generous funding from the Joyce M. Stielau & Herbert W. Stielau Foundation.

We also are working to make our new Joyful Together® ECE manual available to more professionals throughout Ohio!

Parent Voices: Reclaiming Joy

We are developing a new Joyful Together® paradigm: since the model is implemented by caregivers, what do parents experience and feel as they try to infuse joy into their relationships with their children while facing the trials of daily life?

Our next major Joyful Together® project is aimed at uncovering the stories of these parents and families, centering and giving a platform to their voices. As a community-based research center — and part of a community-based behavioral health agency — we know that what we build for the communities we serve must also be by those communities themselves.

This project will help shed necessary light on how and where the model works in the real lives of parents and children.

Learn more about our joyful together in our research publications!