Clinical Trial of Emotion-Focused Skills Training for Parents

Summary

Children with externalizing and internalizing symptoms has been linked to poor emotional competence, problematic understanding and regulation of emotions. A number of recent studies demonstrates the importance of parents' active involvement in the child's recovery process and support the empirical relationship between parenting style and child symptoms. Emotional awareness and acceptance of painful emotional experience in parents leads to reduction in how these emotions are experienced in response to stressors in children. This makes the parent less vulnerable to rumination or suppression of negative emotional experience related to the child. In addition, it releases parents' emotional capacity to be mentally present and emotionally available for their child. Although neuro-affective principles from research have been incorporated in the therapeutic approaches for adults, there are currently no programs that target these mechanisms in working with children with mental health difficulties. Emotion Focused Skills Training (EFST) is an easily administrated, cost efficient treatment program specifically directed towards the parental role in promoting change in children. In this randomized controlled trial, we will compare experiential process oriented EFST with a psycho-educational version of EFST on parents of children aged 6-13 with externalizing or internalizing symptoms. Parents of 236 children will receive a two days course and 6 hours of individually delivered treatment within a 10 weeks period, either with the experiential version of EFST or the psycho-educational version. Feedback regarding outcome on externalizing and internalizing problems will be obtained from parents and teachers at 5 different periods: baseline, treatment completion and at 3, 6 and 9 months follow-up.

Conditions

• F01.318 Child Rearing
• F01.470 Emotions
• F01.145.179 Child Behavior

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Emotion-Focused Skills Training for Parents - Experiential

The intervention consists of a 2-day work shop given in a group format, in addition to 6 hours of parent supervision within 6 weeks after the work shop.

BEHAVIORAL

Emotion-Focused Skills Training for Parents - Psychoeducational

The intervention consists of a 2-day work shop given in a group format, in addition to 6 hours of parent supervision within 6 weeks after the work shop.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of Oslo

  collaborator OTHER

• The Research Council of Norway

  collaborator OTHER

• University of Bergen

  collaborator OTHER

• Institutt for Psykologisk Radgivning

  lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

6 Years

Max Age

13 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2018-10-01

Primary Completion

2020-07-30

Completion

2021-01-30

Countries

• Norway

Study Locations