Mindfulness and Imagery Enhanced Behavioral Parenting: Effectiveness Pilot of the Confident Carers Cooperative Kids Program

Abstract

Mindfulness is increasingly offered to parents of children presenting with behavioral problems, either as a stand-alone intervention, or integrated within existing behavioral parenting interventions. There is relatively modest support for mindful parenting, with small to medium effect size improvements demonstrated across child and parent outcome measures. Here we introduce a mindfulness and imagery enhanced behavioral parenting program. We argue blending mindfulness, imagery and behavioral skills could produce improved parenting engagement and perseverance, leading to stronger outcomes. Pilot data is presented from two contrasting real world clinical settings. Parents attending the 8-week Confident Carers Cooperative Kids (CCCK) group program in a university clinic setting were invited to be included in the study ( n = 20). Permission was also gained to use archival data from a community organisation offering CCCK groups to parents who were at risk of child welfare involvement ( n = 14). Pre- and post-intervention measures were completed across both groups on parent-reported child behavior, parent wellbeing, adaptive parenting, and mindful parenting. Parents from both groups achieved significant pre- to post-intervention improvements in child behavior problems, parent wellbeing, adaptive parenting, and mindful parenting, with large effect sizes. Larger improvements in child behavior problems were reported by parents from the community group compared with the university group. The CCCK intervention appears beneficial across child and parent outcomes, including for families most in need. A larger sample is required to replicate and extend these promising findings.

“I’m getting it!”: How Parents Describe Change Following Attendance at Mindfulness- Enhanced Behavioral Parent Training

“…Mental imagery has been reported as a more powerful change agent than verbal-linguistic processes within other cognitive-behavioral interventions (Baddeley, 2012; Holmes & Matthews, 2010). Imagery and metaphor involve right-hemisphere processes that communicate with parents at a nonverbal and often nonconscious level and are hopefully easier to remember and utilize at times of high stress when the parent's prefrontal cortex may be hijacked by ghtight-freeze responses (Donovan et al, 2023a;Shore, 2019). Based on our ndings, parents appeared to incorporate certain CCCK metaphors and imagery to guide their parenting, most noticeably the bush re model and the color-coded parenting pyramid.…”