Indirect Effects of Parent Training through Emotion Regulation Skills Leading to Reduced Problem Behaviors over the Transition to High School

The high school transition provides a window of opportunity for preventive intervention. This study reports results from an experimental test of the Common Sense Parenting (CSP) parent-training program with low-income families of 8^th graders attending poor performing middle schools and followed into high school. CSP is expected to have indirect effects on reduced substance use, delinquency, and school suspensions at 1-year follow-up through previously reported improvements in child emotion regulation at posttest. Of the 321 families enrolled, 108 were assigned randomly to the control condition, 118 to the standard six-session group workshop-based CSP condition, and 95 to a modified CSP Plus condition that involved adolescents with their parents in two additional sessions. Each family in the study includes a target parent and a target 8^th grader who attended one of five poor-performing middle schools in Tacoma, Washington. Overall, 299 (93%) of the families enrolled in the study were interviewed at posttest, and retention improved at the 1-year follow-up (n = 307; 96%). Child emotion regulation skills were measured via parent-report with a subscale from the Social Competence Scale-Parent (Webster-Stratton, 1998; pretest α = .87; posttest α = .85 ). Standard adolescent self-report items measured the frequency of substance use, delinquency, and suspensions; each outcome was dichotomized. As reported previously (Mason et al., in press), the interventions had a statistically significant effect on increased emotion regulation from pretest to posttest (e.g., CSP vs. control: b=.16, se=.077, β=.10). Separate logistic regression analyses examined CSP and CSP Plus as predictors of each 1-year follow-up outcome, with reference to the control condition and adjusting for pretest levels of the outcome. None of the intervention effects in these analyses were statistically significant. However, results comparing CSP versus the control condition from multivariate path analyses conducted in Mplus 7.11 (unstandardized estimates and 95% bias-corrected bootstrapped confidence intervals reported) revealed a statistically significant indirect effect of CSP on substance use (b = -.060 [-.175, -.006]), delinquency (-.047 [-.150, -.003]), and suspensions (-.067 [-.195, -.012]). None of the indirect effects was statistically significant in a CSP Plus versus control condition model. Child emotion regulation is one target of CSP, which helps parents learn, model, and teach their children skills for anger management, coping, and problem solving. Findings suggest that parent-training programs can support the transition to high school by improving emotion regulation skills, in turn protecting against adolescent problem outcomes that often increase during the high school years.