Tuning in to Teens in Aotearoa New Zealand: evaluating an emotion coaching programme for parents of young adolescents in Child Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS).

Tuning in to Teens TM (TINT). This is a programme for parents of adolescents that has been adapted from a programme for younger children, Tuning into Kids TM by Professor Sophie Havighurst and team at the University of Melbourne. This programme aims to support parents to better ‘tune in’ to the emotions of their children by becoming ‘emotion coaches’. Emotion coaching is an adaptive emotion socialisation style which encourages understanding and acceptance of emotional experience TINT is designed to be delivered in a group format over either 6 or 8 weekly sessions of two hours each. An 8-week format will be used for the study as the recommended format for clinical settings. Sessions will be held at Child Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) and delivered by trained CAMHS clinicians. The focus of sessions is teaching emotion coaching skills. Sessions also include information about adolescent development, teaching of emotion regulation skills such as mindfulness, and supporting parents to reflect on meta-emotions (i.e. their own beliefs about emotions based on their life experiences). Each session includes a mix of teaching, shared reflection and practicing learnt skills. Participants are encouraged to practice emotion coaching skills outside sessions and there are optional homework tasks assigned each session designed to facilitated parent-teen communication. These are typically worksheet based conversation prompts to complete with their teen focused on different emotions such as ‘How can you tell if a friend is happy or sad?’ Optional homework tasks are expected to take 30-60 minutes per week. Facilitators may be clinicians in CAMHS of any discipline or experience. They must be trained in delivery of TINT to facilitate the program. Training will be provided by the programme developers. A manual is provided to facilitators to guide sessions. Handouts are provided to parents for each session to review material. A fidelity checklist for each session is provided with the manual which facilitators will complete to check adherence to content. Facilities will have supervision with the research team at set intervals through the study. Adaptions for the cultural context in New Zealand may be made to running of groups. Unless specifically justified, this will not include significant adaptations to the programme content may include processes around it, for example opening and closing of sessions. Participants in the intervention arm will also receive other care as usual from CAMHS in the study period, i.e. this is evaluating an addition to usual care not an alternative. Prior to the start of this trial, a separate sample of participants will recruited from the same population to co-design an outcome measure to be included in the trial. This will involve a group of parents and a group of 10-14 year olds who will each participate in a workshop facilitated by the researchers to discuss how to measure the impact of TINT with the aim of producing a measure to be included in the trial. Workshops will be 2 to 3 hours long with breaks. Facilitation will take the form of open ended questions e.g. "How would you know if something had helped your family?", followed by discussion and structured activities to define outcomes e.g. ranking exercises to pick top outcomes. From these, a draft measure will be developed and follow-up sought as appropriate from participants e.g. to test the measure. Experts in co-design in health in New Zealand are advising on the design and delivery of these workshops.