Parenting Cognition and Affective Outcomes Following Parent Management Training: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Parent management training (PMT) is considered the gold standard in the treatment of child behavior problems. The secondary effects of these interventions, particularly on parent well-being, are infrequently studied, despite evidence that parents of children with behavior problems often experience personal difficulties. This narrative review examined the affective and parenting cognition outcomes of PMT for mothers and fathers of children ages 2-13 years, across 48 controlled treatment studies. Substantial support was found for reductions in parenting stress, and increases in perceived parenting competence following PMT. Evidence indicated fewer improvements in domains more distal from parenting, including parent depressive symptoms and marital relationship dysfunction. A number of studies suggested parent gender as a moderator of parent outcomes of PMT; however, the underrepresentation of fathers in existing research limits conclusions in this regard. Avenues for future research are highlighted to address current gaps in the literature, and to further our understanding of the ways in which both children and parents may benefit from PMT.

How Do Mothers’ Parental Attributions Affect Child Outcomes from a Positive Parenting Intervention? A Mediation Study

“…Other limitations of the current study present as possible directions for future research. We examined improvements in parental attributions and parent-child relationships as related outcomes consistent with research studying secondary outcomes of BPT [13,38,39]. However, changes in parental attributions and outcomes in parental feelings about the child were assessed at the same time; thus, the results do not tease out any putative directionality of influence.…”

Family therapy and systemic interventions for child‐focused problems: the current evidence base

“…Contextual factors. Meta-analyses also show that behavioural parent training not only affects children's behaviour but also improves parental well-being (Colalillo and Johnston, 2016;Trivedi, 2017); it is as effective in routine community settings as it is specialist programme development clinics (Michelson et al, 2013); more intensive programmes are more effective (Nowak and Heinrichs, 2008); and computer-based parent training programmes can be effective for families with pre-adolescent children with clinically significant behaviour problems (Baumel et al, 2016).…”

Improved Child Mental Health Following Brief Relationship Enhancement and Co-Parenting Interventions During the Transition to Parenthood

“…Another possible interpretation of these findings is that instead of improving objective child outcomes, the interventions instead improved parental perceptions of their children, a limitation that could be overcome with use of objective assessments of child behavior in future studies [13]. Nevertheless, we note that improvement in parent perception of their children may be accompanied by improvement in perceived parent competence, [60] which is likely to have downstream positive effects on behavior. Additionally, the mechanisms of change driving the effects were not evaluated and so it is unclear if the intervention influenced child development through relationship factors or changes in parental mood and/or stress, each of which have been associated with parent-child interactions.…”