Parent–child creative activities are associated with children’s positive affect and relationships quality

Engagement in everyday creative activities has been shown to enhance positive affect. However, most studies focus on older children or adults and tend to emphasize individual creativity. Little attention has been given to dyadic creativity (particularly among younger children aged 4–6), its effects on positive affect, and the processes that may explain these effects. Grounded in self-determination theory, this research addresses these gaps by exploring how parent–child creative interactions contribute to children’s positive affect. Data from 207 households across France and the United Kingdom (106 French and 101 British) was collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, using a new psychometric tool developed for this study: the Parent–Child Creative Activities Checklist. This scale demonstrated satisfactory preliminary factorial validation across both French and United Kingdom cultural contexts and suggested that parent–child home creativity is a latent factor composed of imaginative activities, artistic activities, and creative movement. Our results show that dyadic creative activities are positively associated with children’s positive affect, higher parent–child affectionate relationships, and lower conflictual relationships. However, contrary to our expectations, parent–child relationship quality was not identified as a potential significant mediator in the link between home creativity and positive affect. Our findings reveal new hypothetical positive outcomes of parent–child creative activities: they share 7% of the variance with low-conflict relationships, 50% of the variance with affectionate relationships, while accounting for 30% of the variance in children’s positive affect

Creativity · Developmental psychology · Child Therapy and Development · Communication · Early Childhood Education and Development · Education and Learning Interventions · Psychology · Social Psychology