What is BBC Tiny Happy People?
BBC Tiny Happy People is a free to use website for parents/carers with children under 5 years old.
The fun, easy to do activities, tips and advice section and child development content have all been created with experts to help parents/carers support their little ones' language and communication development.
BBC Tiny Happy People is also a great tool for professionals who work in Early Years across Health, Education and within organisations.
The COM-B Model
Our approach is underpinned by a behaviour change model known as COM-B, developed at UCL in 2012 and now used in healthcare interventions around the world.
Our aim is to empower parents to understand their role in their child's development and encourage them to carry out language activities in the home learning environment.
We introduce key behaviours to families that are beneficial for children’s language learning, and demonstrate how they can be built into their daily lives and repeated often enough to have a positive impact.
What is available to you?
- Free evidence-based content that you can trust.
- Free video content to share with the families you work with; our activity films model easy-to-do techniques parents/carers can use to support language development in the home learning environment.
- A wide variety of articles with tips and advice from Speech, Language & Communication, Healthcare and Early Years experts.
- Free digital resources that you can download, print and share.
All of our resources are categorised into 3 sections.
1. Activities
Here you’ll find hundreds of fun activities all organised by age, showing parents and carers how to support their child’s speech, language and communication skills in the home learning environment.
The on-screen messaging shows families how and why doing the activities can help language development.
Each age starts with a ‘Tools for Talking’ film that models a specific technique to support language learning.
The activities have been created in line with the early years framework and use no or low cost items that can easily be found around the home or when out and about.
Find activity inspiration for all ages
2. Tips and advice
Next, our ‘Tips and Advice’ section covers general parenting topics from A to Z and has a wide range of articles and films with advice from speech, language and communication experts, healthcare professionals and early years practitioners.
Here you’ll find tips and advice, from managing emotional behaviour and parent wellbeing, to language learning in bilingual children.
3. Child development
Our 'Child Development' content shows families why supporting language learning is important.
It’s all about children’s amazing brain development, how they learn language and understand the world around them.
It’s here that parents and carers will find lots of fascinating facts about how their little ones learn language from listening to and watching.
Read about child development and milestones
Sharing content with families
At the top of each page, under the title of the film or article, you will see icons to share our content.
- This can be via X (Twitter), Facebook or WhatsApp.
- You can also copy the page link and email directly to the family you are working with.
- Why not try finding an article or film and sending it over as a recommendation?
Searchable Content Spreadsheet
With over 1,100 films on our site, it can be tricky to locate the exact film you're looking for!
To make it easier, we've created our content spreadsheet showing every film on the website and its location.
Search this document using key words, for example 'weaning’, to help narrow down to the most relevant piece of content. Use Control F on Windows or Command F on a Mac.