Parent-Led Stepped Care Trauma Treatment: Parents’ Experiences With Helping Their Child Recover

Abstract

Purpose There is a need for interventions for traumatized children that are easily accessible and effective, and that involve parents directly in the recovery process. To meet this challenge, stepped care trauma-focused cognitive behavioral treatment (SC TF-CBT), which consists of a parent-led therapist-assisted intervention as the first step, was developed. Parent-led trauma-treatment is a promising, but novel approach. The aim of this study was therefore to gain knowledge on how parents experience the model. Methods Parents who participated in a SC TF-CBT feasibility study were consecutively recruited and interviewed with semi-structured interviews, which were then analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Results The parents described that the intervention gave them insights that led to a sense of parental agency. Through the analysis we identified and labelled four themes: (i) understanding my child: how the trauma has affected my child and our relationship; (ii) understanding myself: how my reactions have stood in the way of helping my child; (iii) gaining competence: how to learn specific tasks that were not part of my normal parenting skills; and (iv) receiving support: how guidance, warmth and encouragement was necessary. Conclusions The results from this study show how the shifting of therapeutic tasks to parents may facilitate parental empowerment and improve the parent-child relationship. This knowledge may guide clinicians on how to provide support to parents so they can take a leading role in their child’s recovery process after trauma. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04073862. Retrospectively registered 03 June 2019 (first patient recruited May 2019), https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04073862.

Parent-led stepped care for traumatised children: parental factors that predict treatment completion and response

“…To date, SC-CBT-CT shows comparable results to TF-CBT in reducing PTSS, and cost–benefit analyses have estimated that the cost is reduced by 54%, with a 47% response rate to Step One for intention to treat, and 71% for completers (Salloum et al, 2022 ). Overall, parents are typically satisfied with the SC-CBT-CT treatment (Salloum et al, 2016 ), and many have reported that leading their children's treatment in SC-CBT-CT empowered them and improved their relationship with their children (Fagermoen et al, 2023 ). However, there is currently little data about how parental factors are related to treatment completion and treatment response of the parent-led Step One.…”