Zippy’s Friends
An International Mental Health Promotion
Programme for Young Children
Zippy’s Friends is a programme specifically designed for six and seven year old children. It
was developed and perfected over the course of five years, with extensive pilot testing and
research evaluating both implementation and effects. It is taught in schools and kindergartens
by teachers who have been specially trained, and runs for 24 weeks with one session per week.
Over the six months, the programme teaches all children how to cope with everyday difficulties,
identify and talk about their feelings and explore ways of dealing with them through role play
situations. It also encourages children to help others with their problems and to ask for and use
help when they are in need. The heart of the programme is a set of six stories about a group of
children and a stick insect called Zippy. Over the course of 24 weeks, the stories track what
happens to Zippy and his friends, dealing with issues that are familiar to young children –
friendship, communication, loneliness, bullying, dealing with change and loss, and
making a new start. The materials complement SEAL.
Each session has activities, to reinforce the messages of the stories. Children act out role plays,
draw pictures, work with puppets and even visit a graveyard. The emphasis is very much on
encouraging children to explore, helping them to find their own solutions and expand their
range of coping strategies. Children therefore have more options from which to choose and will
learn to master effective means of coping with difficulties. Young children learn through
repetition and key messages are reinforced throughout the programme. Zippy’s Friends does
not only look at problems and difficulties. It also focuses on strengths, abilities, positive
emotions and effective use of support and resources. Instead of highlighting inadequate
behaviour, it emphasizes the child’s ability to learn, adapt and improve skills. Crucially, the
programme fosters coping strategies that involve children’s abilities to be helpful and supportive
of others. This contrasts with the individualistic focus of programmes that emphasize personal
competence over collective involvement.
Many teachers who taught the programme have said that its first and most obvious impact is
that children become much better at resolving conflicts. One Danish teacher overheard a
playground conversation in which a boy was complaining to two others about their bullying. The
bullies then explained why they had bullied him. “I couldn’t believe it,” said the teacher, “three
six-year-olds analysing bullying!”
Zippy’s Friends has been developed and tested in the contrasting settings of Denmark and
Lithuania. A major evaluation was led by Professor Brian Mishara from the University of Quebec
at Montreal in Canada and Associate Professor Mette Ystgaard from the University of Oslo in
Norway. The evaluation was completed in August 2001 and was based on data from
experimental and control groups in both Denmark and Lithuania (Mishara and Ystgaard, 2001;
Bale and Mishara 2004). The evaluators found that children in the experimental groups showed
significant improvements in all the four key social skills that were tested – cooperation, selfcontrol, assertion and empathy. There were clear improvements in coping skills. In both
Denmark and Lithuania there was an increase in positive coping strategies such as saying sorry,
talking to a friend or telling the truth, and a decrease in negative strategies, such as anger,
screaming or biting their own nails. In Lithuania, the evaluators also looked at two problem
behaviours – externalizing and hyperactivity – and found that children in the programme
showed significant decreases in both, compared to children in the control group. The evaluators
concluded that participation in Zippy’s Friends results in significant improvements in coping,
social skills and problem behaviours, and they were “amazed” to find that these effects were
equally evident in boys and girls.
Two more evaluation studies in Lithuania have assessed the programme’s ongoing effects. The
first looked at children one year after they had completed Zippy’s Friends and found that
improvements recorded during the programme were still maintained a year later. The second
found that children who had participated in Zippy’s Friends in their final year at kindergarten
handled the transition to primary school with fewer adjustment problems and more positive
experiences than children who had not participated in the programme. Mishara and Ystgaard
concluded their study by saying: “We don’t know of another similar programme for young
children that has been the object of such a detailed and rigorous evaluation process” (Mishara
and Ystgaard, 2001).
Although Zippy’s Friends is primarily intended to help young children, it also has value for
teachers. Many who have run the programme say that it has changed their perceptions of
young children, improved classroom communication and decreased disruptive behaviour. Some
experts have even commented that the programme’s greatest value is as a teacher training
tool. Almost all of the schools and kindergartens that have run the programme once have
decided to do so again. Presentations at international conferences have reinforced the view that
there is a lack of mental health promotion programmes for six and seven year old children. For
this reason, and because it is generic (rather than country specific) and has been thoroughly
evaluated, there has been widespread interest n Zippy’s Friends. Links have been forged with
the World Health Organization’s European Network of Health Promoting Schools.
In 2009-10, Zippy’s Friends was running in 19 countries involving 100,000 children worldwide.
The programme was introduced to 7 Northamptonshire schools in February 2010 through the
Targeted Mental Health in Schools (TaMHS) project. NCC Educational Psychologists are involved
in on-going cascading of the programme to schools across the county with training for schools
being organised in Term 1 of each year from autumn 2010. If you are interested in your KS1
teachers being trained, then contact Mike Simons misimons@northamptonshire.gov.uk to find
out when the next training is taking place and how to book a place. Further information,
including references for evaluation studies, are available from Partnership for Children at
www.partnershipforchildren.org.uk