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Emotion Focused Family Therapy for Parents of Children With Mental Health Difficulties

NCT05603000 · Status: RECRUITING · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 200

Last updated 2026-01-23

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

Emotion Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) is a promising intervention that aims to teach parents advanced skills to support their child's development of emotion skills and increase their adaptive behaviours, potentially leading to improvements in their child's psychological functioning and family functioning more broadly.

This randomized controlled trial (RCT; EFFT vs waitlist control) will (1) test the efficacy of a 6-week group EFFT program on parent and child outcomes and (2) examine maintenance of treatment gains up to four months post-intervention.

Conditions

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Emotion Focused Family Therapy

The Emotion Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) intervention for this study will be delivered to groups of four to ten parents over six weekly sessions of two hours each. The goal of EFFT is to teach and empower parents to coach their child to process the emotions at the source of their mental health symptoms, to increase their child's adaptive behaviours, and to repair emotional injuries within the parent-child relationship. EFFT also targets parents' own emotional challenges that may prevent them from feeling capable or being able to support their child's treatment. Each EFFT session will include introductions, psychoeducation about emotion and psychopathology, introduction of skills, experiential activities (e.g., chair work), open discussion and feedback, and homework activities covering the foci of EFFT: emotion coaching, behaviour coaching, therapeutic apology, and parental emotion blocks.

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • University of Guelph

    lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

  • Kristel Thomassin, Ph.D · University of Guelph

Study Design

Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
TREATMENT
Masking
DOUBLE
Model
PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age
7 Years
Max Age
15 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2022-10-11
Primary Completion
2027-03-31
Completion
2027-03-31

Countries

  • Canada

Study Locations

More Related Trials

Entities

Diseases

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT05603000 on ClinicalTrials.gov