The FRIENDS anxiety prevention program: Does an additional parent resilience intervention affect child outcomes

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The etiology of mental ill-health is commonly complex and can often involve not one but a chain of genetic, environmental, social and psychological risk factors. Understanding these risk factors is essential to being able to identify children at risk of developing future mental health difficulties, planning appropriate timing of an intervention and ascertaining necessary treatment components for any intervention. Risk factors may be individual, familial and environmental characteristics that increase the likelihood of adverse developmental outcomes. Although no single risk factor is either necessary or sufficient in the development of a specific disorder, the commonly indicated risk factors in young children are parental psychopathology, temperament and prior symptomology. Parental psychopathology is commonly accepted as a risk factor for both genetic and environmental pathways towards childhood mental health problems. Family aggregation studies of both the offspring of clinically diagnosed parents and parents of children with mental health difficulties have demonstrated the heritability of mental disorders Connell and Goodman’s meta-analytic review investigated the associations between parental psychopathology and internalizing and externalizing disorders in their children. Based on the 230 articles identified on parental mental health concerns and childhood internalizing difficulties, the authors found that both maternal and paternal psychopathology significantly predicted childhood symptomology. It should be noted, however, that weighted mean effect sizes in this study were small. Additionally, it was found that effects were moderated by child factors, including age and gender, as well as type of parental diagnosis. These findings suggest that the relationship between parental psychopathology and child psychopathology is not a simple direct linear association. Rather, the interaction of parental influences and child influences is more likely to determine future symptomology. Despite an exponential increase in resilience research for children, there is currently a lack of evidence exploring how adult resilience affects the development of childhood resilience. As the link between vulnerability factors, protective factors and wellbeing in psychopathological pathways is unclear, it cannot be assumed that the heritability and modeling of psychopathology between parent and child directly indicates a similar link relationship for parent and child resilience. As such, this study will to explore both the relationship between parent-child resilience and symptomology and how resilience enhancement in parents affects children’s resilience and symptomology intervention outcomes.

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