Parent-child Communication and Health-risk Behavior

Summary

Engaging in health-risk behaviors such as tobacco and alcohol use put youth at risk for health problems that may compromise their futures and are extremely costly to society. Positive parent-child communication, characterized by openness, satisfaction with the family, caring, and effective problem-solving, has been found to be protective against a youth's involvement in health-risk behaviors. To promote positive adult-youth communication, in earlier work we developed, tested, and found efficacious an intervention, Mission Possible: Parents and Kids Who Listen (MP). This study is designed to test the following hypotheses: (a) Adults and youth who participate in MP will demonstrate more positive communication when compared with adults who did not participate; (b) Youth who participate in MP will have a lower incidence of health-risk behavior when compared with youth who did not participate; and (c) Positive adult-youth communication will mediate childhood health-risk behavior in the presence of risk processes that predict participation. The experimental design is a 2-group (intervention and comparison) pre-test repeated measures design with six waves of data collection over three years and two booster sessions of the intervention. Elementary school and community centers in Madison and Chicago served as recruitment sites for parent-child dyads.

Conditions

• Parent-Child Relations

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Mission Possible: Parents & Kids Who Listen

MP is a 12-hour, 6-session, manualized skills training program with 2 boosters. Behavioral strategies teach adults and youth to communicate with one another emphasizing youth's need for flexible family boundaries, emotional closeness, and adults as resources. Dyads attend together. Sessions begin with relaxation exercises, review of the prior week's lessons and homework, and examination of success and failure in trying communication techniques. New concepts are introduced using didactic videotaped presentations. Lively, interactive, developmentally appropriate group exercises follow reflective of ethnic diversity that are reinforced with handouts and encouragement to try them at home. Week-by-week content covers: Developmental Changes; Self-Esteem; Communicating What You Want; Listening to What the Other Wants; Solving Conflicts; and Letting Go. The booster sessions are 2 hours in length and update developmental concepts; 5 basic listening skills; and 6 conflict resolution steps.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Loyola University Chicago

  collaborator OTHER

• Iowa State University

  collaborator OTHER

• University of Wisconsin, Madison

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Susan K Riesch, PhD · University of Wisconsin, Madison

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

PREVENTION

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

10 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2004-08-31

Primary Completion

2010-02-28

Completion

2010-12-31