Social Workers' Choice Making in Supporting Nature Activities by Parents and Children in Shelters.

Visiting a natural environment such as a garden or park helps people to recover from stressful circumstances. Women's shelters and homeless shelters have started to integrate nature in their work, especially for families who seek temporary refuge, with the aim to support parents' functioning and resilience. For professionals who want to facilitate engagement with nature among their clients, it may be helpful to learn how other professionals choose nature activities for the support of parents. The current study was aimed to uncover how social workers choose a nature activity for the support of parents, resulting in a model that can be used as a reflective tool among shelter professionals. The model is based on an analysis of actions of professionals, captured in case descriptions written by shelter professionals about parenting supportive nature activities that they facilitated for families under their care. The model shows that social workers promoted a back-and-forth between children's exploration away from the parent and being with the parent. In facilitating these interactions, social workers used nature as an environment with stress reducing and strengthening capacities for parents and as an environment with supportive qualities for children's play. A dimensional framework was extracted that described how professionals may choose activities.

Experiencing Nature to Satisfy Basic Psychological Needs in Parenting: A Quasi-Experiment in Family Shelters.

Finding fulfillment of basic psychological needs may be difficult for parents living in shelters after becoming homeless or after escaping violence. This study tested if experiencing nature was associated with the basic psychological needs of parents in shelters. Need satisfaction and need frustration were measured among parents in shelters (N = 160), with one measurement in the standard indoor context of the shelter and one measurement while experiencing nature. Experiencing nature was associated with enhanced need satisfaction (d = 0.28) and reduced need frustration (d = -0.24). The effect was especially pronounced for parents with young children. Our findings suggest that the physical environment matters for parents' basic psychological need fulfillment as they interact with their children in the context of sheltering. This finding opens a potential avenue for supporting parental functioning and resilience in the face of risk if these effects were to be replicated across settings using controlled experimental designs. At the very least, the findings may be discussed with practitioners and parents in the context of making shelter life and work more conducive to mental health and family functioning.