ECPN poster contestant: Moderated Mediation of Child Mental Health Outcomes from Divorced/Separating Families

Children of divorce are at risk for developing mental and physical health problems. Improving quality of parenting can mitigate these detrimental effects. In the efficacy trial of the New Beginnings Program (NBP), the intervention causally changed variables that mediate the effects of divorce on child mental health outcomes (e.g., discipline and relationship quality) and directly improved child mental health outcomes (Wolchik et al., 2000). The current study tested the mediated effects of an effectiveness trial of the NBP, specifically, whether program-induced improvements in father parenting and interparental conflict at posttest lead to improvements in child adjustment at ten-month follow-up.

The sample consisted of 384 families (201 in the NBP and 183 in the control condition). Additionally, 224 children between 9 and 18 years old gave self-reported data. Parenting was assessed using father and child report of multiple scales evaluating different aspects of parenting. To calculate the mediated effect and test for its significance, we used RMediation (Tofighi & MacKinnon, 2011). We used structural equation modeling to test prospective mediation models where the mediator was measured at posttest and the outcome was measured at ten-month follow-up. Occasionally, there are delayed effects on mediators that may take a longer period of time to show, so we also tested half-mediation models where both the mediator and the outcome were measured at ten-month follow-up. When appropriate (i.e., when there was significant moderation on the mediator, on the outcome, or on both), we analyzed moderated mediation models where the significance of the mediated effect depended on the level of the moderator.

For the three-wave longitudinal mediation models, there were no significant mediated effects for child reported variables; however, there were many for father reported variables. For instance, for fathers who reported higher levels of baseline conflict, the indirect mediated effect of intervention group through warmth on externalizing problems was associated with a 0.43-point decrease on the T score of the CBCL (ab = -0.43, 95% CI [-1.00, -0.02]). Additionally, there were significant mediated effects for the half-mediation models. For example, for children who reported low positive parenting at baseline, there was significant mediation of the intervention on child report of internalizing problems through positive parenting (ab= -0.86, 95% CI [-2.09, -0.02]).

The results provide strong evidence that NBP-Dads strengthens the quality of father post-divorce parenting as reported by both fathers and their children and that improvements in parenting at posttest or ten-month follow-up mediate program effects on child mental health problems ten months later.