Building Regulation in Dual Generations

Summary

Families who experience maternal mental illness and a variety of chronic stressors are currently underserved by the parenting programs. The investigators propose that impairments in maternal self-regulation, which result in unsupportive parenting, directly impact children's own self-regulation and neurobiology, leading to risk for intergenerational transmission of mental illness. The objective of this study is to develop and evaluate a program that is targeted at improving underlying self-regulatory mechanisms in both mothers with depression and their 3 to 5-year-old children. It is hypothesized that children exposed to maternal mental illness will have greater self-regulatory deficits across emotional and behavioural domains, compared to children not exposed to mental illness. The effects of maternal mental illness are expected to be compounded for children of mothers reporting a higher degree of chronic stressors, including poverty, housing instability, violence, and low social support. Further, it is hypothesized that taking a dual-generation intervention approach to addressing self-regulatory mechanisms underlying psychopathology at the level of the mother, child, and dyad (i.e. parenting interactions) will improve both maternal capacities and child outcomes. The objectives for this study are to 1) establish a better understanding of the self-regulatory processes that are altered in preschool-aged children exposed to maternal mental illness, and determine the mediating role of parenting behaviours, as well as the moderating impact of chronic stress exposure; and 2) develop and evaluate a novel dual-generation intervention for mothers with mental illness and their 3 to 5-year-old children based on existing gold-standard evidence-based approaches.

Conditions

• Depression
• Self-regulation
• Child Development

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

BRIDGE Therapy Program

The BRIDGE Therapy Program is a novel structured form of therapy that incorporates key parenting concepts and related Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) modules. The primary aim of the program is to promote self-regulation in the mother-child dyads. The program involves 20, once per week, scheduled group therapy sessions that last for 2 hours. There are two components of the program, the first is the DBT section, which will follow the DBT Skills Training Manual 2nd Edition and will target maternal mental health symptomology. The second section is the parent skill training materials, which have been designed to correspond to the 4 core DBT modules (Mindfulness, Emotion Regulation, Distress Tolerance, and Interpersonal Effectiveness) and to promote self-regulatory skill development and a positive parent-child relationship.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Research Manitoba

  collaborator OTHER

• Centre for Addiction and Mental Health

  collaborator OTHER

• University of Oregon

  collaborator OTHER

• University of Manitoba

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Lauren Kaminski, MA · University of Manitoba

Study Design

Allocation

NON_RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

FEMALE

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2019-09-15

Primary Completion

2020-06-01

Completion

2020-06-01

Countries

• Canada

Study Locations