Parenting Interventions: Do They Affect Children Through Enhancing Positive Parenting or Through Decreasing Negative Parenting?

Introduction

Programs targeting parent-child interactions have been shown to reduce children’s conduct problems, delinquency, substance use, and depression, across the life span (see Sandler, Schoenfelder, Wolchik, and MacKinnon, 2011).  These programs are supposed to work by increasing positive parenting behaviors and decreasing negative parenting behaviors. However, very few studies have tested whether the changes in children are indeed due to changes in parenting behaviors. In other words, there is a lack of studies that investigate mediating mechanisms of parent training programs and compare the effects of different components of parenting programs in the same model (e.g. positive versus negative parenting behaviors).  Moreover, the existing studies about mediating processes of parenting programs are limited to a specific age group (e.g. middle childhood). This narrow focus limits our understanding of what processes are developmentally appropriate.

The present study attempts to overcome the above-mentioned limitations by answering the following research questions:

1)      Do parenting programs decrease children conduct problems through enhancing positive parenting (such as attempts to understanding) or through decreasing negative parenting (such as harsh parenting)?

2)      Are these mechanisms age specific?

Methods

Data come from an RCT national evaluation of parenting programs in Sweden. The sample includes 908 parents and their 3 to 12 year old children. Parents were randomly assigned to one of the four most common parenting programs (i.e., Komet, Connect, Incredible Years, Cope) in Sweden or to a waitlist condition. Measures included various indices of negative (e.g. harsh parenting) and positive parenting behaviors (e.g. attempted to understanding), and children conduct problems (e.g., ECBI). We collected these measures from parents just before and two months after the end of the intervention programs. First, we tested whether positive and negative parenting behaviors mediate the effect of program on child conduct problems in the whole group using Mplus. Then, we performed multiple-group analysis to test the same mediation model in young (3-7 years older) and old children (8-12 years older).

Results

Results showed that all the parenting programs decreased children problematic behaviors through decreasing negative parenting behaviors (Indirect effect =.04, p<.05). No mediation effect was found for positive parenting. The results held for both with young and old children.

Discussion

The results suggest that the effect of the parenting programs is due to decreases in negative parenting behaviors rather than improvements in positive parenting.  Prevention efforts need to pay greater effort to develop strategies that may reduce negative parenting behaviors.