Abstract
The absence of school-based mental health interventions results in disruptive and unsafe classrooms where children and teachers lack the strategies to regulate their emotions. Caring Classrooms is a short-term mental health programme developed locally in Zimbabwe, which utilises Emotional Regulation Skills and Child-Directed Healing Play (CDHP) to harness the power of the student-teacher relationship as the vehicle for both therapeutic change and preventive resilience. This preliminary study evaluated the effectiveness of CDHP in improving emotional regulation among primary-aged children in 7 Private Primary Schools in Zimbabwe. Thirty-one teachers (28 females and 3 males) received training. Out of 431 children, sixty-two children (22 girls and 40 boys) aged 3-12 years were screened using the Youth Outcome Questionnaires (YOQ) completed by parents. Quantitative data were gathered at two points in time: prior to the intervention (pre-test) and after the completion of the intervention (post-test) using the Emotional Regulation Checklist. Using the Wilcoxon Rank-Sum Test, the p-value for Emotional Regulation (ER) was 0.002724, deemed statistically significant and indicative of a distinct difference in ER scores between the Control and Intervention groups. Thus, the intervention has a positive effect on improving emotional regulation among primary-aged children in schools. As a promising practice where, trained teachers deliver mental health care services to children, CDHP could be replicated in other schools.