ECPN poster contestant: Parent’s Attitude about Interventions and Change in Parenting Practices

Introduction:

Maximizing parental engagement and participation in parenting programs is critical for optimal intervention response in improving parenting practices. However, little work has investigated how the effect of one parent’s attitude toward an intervention may function as a bidirectional process, potentially influencing their own intervention response as well as changes in parenting practices in their partner. This study investigated this issue by incorporating two dyadic analysis models: a dyadic latent growth model (dyadic LGM) to examine longitudinal change of parenting behavior and an actor-partner interdependence model (APIM) to consider how attitudes of each member affects others behavior.

Methods:

This study used longitudinal data from 336 military couples who participated a randomized controlled trial (62% intervention/38% control) of the After Deployment Adaptive Parenting Tools (ADAPT) parent training preventive intervention. Parent’s attitudes and their parenting skills were collected using the Parent Views of Intervention Questionnaire (PVIQ) and Alabama Parenting Questionnaire (APQ) with three follow-up assessments (6-months intervals). The non-independence within the couples was considered in both outcome variables (i.e., parenting skills), with dyadic LGM to reflect change of behavior, and predictor variables (i.e., parent’s baseline attitude) in an APIM to examine actor and partner effects.

Results:

This dyadic analysis was used to examine the impact of mothers’ and fathers’ attitude towards treatment at baseline on change in their parenting behaviors in the context of intervention and control groups. There were no significant interactions between intervention condition and attitude towards the intervention, However, the model revealed that for both intervention and control groups, mother’s positive attitude towards intervention predicted improvement in mother’s parenting skill over time (b=.357, =.154, p<.05) (i.e., actor effect), but no partner effect was found on father’s parenting skill. There was no significant effect of father’s attitude on father’s change in parenting behavior nor on mother’s parenting behavior.

Conclusions:

Irrespective of mothers’ actual participation in a parenting program, mother’s positive attitude toward an intervention predicted positive change in mother’s parenting skills. The mothers who are open to an intervention and have interest in learning parenting techniques tend to improve their parenting over time even when not supported by an intervention. Attitude toward interventions was less relevant for fathers. Father’s attitudes toward parent training should be investigated further to better understand their role in parenting change.