None listed
Conditions
Brief summary
The Holding Hands Program is a parenting program designed to assist parents and carers of young children who are having difficulty parenting. It draws on recent research and treatment evidence about the importance of parent-child relationships and parent emotion regulation for child development. The trial will be delivered at the UTS Family Child Behaviour Clinic within the Graduate School of Health at UTS. The Holding Hands Program will be delivered by provisionally registered UTS Master of Clinical Psychology students in their final year of training. The study will use a within groups design to compare the outcome of treatment as usual with the outcomes from The Holding Hands Program. It is hypothesised that treatment gains will be demonstrated post intervention and at follow-up, and will include statistically and clinically significant change in child and parent functioning. Everyone working on the trial will hold a current NSW Working With Children Check..
Interventions
The Holding Hands Program is a program of preventative intervention designed to interrupt trajectories toward child social, emotional, and behavioural difficulties as they commence in young children. It addresses parent emotion regulation, child behaviour and parent-child relationships by delivering treatment components targeting parent, parenting and child outcomes.
Holding Hands is delivered online from the UTS: Family Child Behaviour Clinic to parent(s) or carers of individual families It is
The Holding Hands Program is a program of preventative intervention designed to interrupt trajectories toward child social, emotional, and behavioural difficulties as they commence in young children. It addresses parent emotion regulation, child behaviour and parent-child relationships by delivering treatment components targeting parent, parenting and child outcomes. Holding Hands is delivered online from the UTS: Family Child Behaviour Clinic to parent(s) or carers of individual families It is delivered to families reporting clinically significant levels of child social, emotional, or behavioural difficulties, and/or parenting difficulties in their child(ren) aged 12-60 months. Families are engaged following a screening process that ensures that it is an appropriate program for each family and that referral to another service is not warranted. Preliminary online psychometric assessment utilises the CBCL and the PSI. A Holding Hands Practitioners Manual is used to guide delivery of treatment and it contains sessional handouts relevant to material presented in each treatment module. Prior to entry into the program, informed consent is gained from parent(s) and carers and they are provided with an account of mandatory reporting and limitations to confidentiality. They then proceed through six treatment modules, the length of which varies depending on the family, their characteristics of presentation and their capacity. Briefly, the modules cover the definition, identification, and contingent engagement of desirable child functioning; the regulation of parental emotion; the application parent and parenting skill in ecologically valid settings using video; the consolidation of regulated parental emotion and contingent engagement of desirable child behaviour; dispassionate responding to undesirable child functioning and it’s implications for child behaviour; and parent’s capacity to perceive the world from their child’s perspective and ways to ensure that treatment gains demonstrated are maintained. Holding Hands will be delivered online from the UTS Family Child Behaviour Clinic to parent(s) or carers of individual families by Master of Clinical Psychology students in their final year of clinical training. The Six modules of the program are delivered over 6-12 60 minute weekly sessions depending on family characteristics of presentation and capacity, Sessions are comprised of brief assessment live didactic teaching, interactive discussion, discussion about the application of skills and setting and review of homework tasks. The order of the six program modules is established and must be maintained, however, individual sessions remain responsive to individual family characteristics and needs, and as a result may vary in focus or number. Intervention adherence and fidelity will be discussed and assessed within daily clinical supervision provided by an endorsed Clinical Psychologist and Psychology Board of Australia Board Approved Supervisor. Practitioner self-assessment is sought session by session and this, together with sessional psychometrics, provides an informed basis on which to maintain adherence to the program manual.
Sponsors
Dr John McAloon - University of Technology Sydney
Study design
Allocation
Non-randomised trial
Intervention model
Other
Primary purpose
Treatment
Masking
Open (masking not used)
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
All
Age
12 Months to 60 Months
Healthy volunteers
No
Inclusion criteria
Enrollment in this trial requires parent(s) of families with the target child is aged between 12 and 60 months to be referred into the Holding Hands Program for treatment because of child social, emotional or behavioural challenges and/or because of difficulties in parenting. Psychometric assessment (parent report) must place children in the clinical or subclinical range on either the Oppositional Defiant or Anxiety sub-scales of the CBCL 1.5 - 5.
Exclusion criteria
Prospective participants will be excluded if they fall outside inclusion criteria or on the basis that significant marital/relationship difficulties, significant mental health difficulties, unmanaged substance use, and/or child protection concerns are identified. In these cases, appropriate referrals will be sought for the clients should they wish to pursue those as an option.
Outcome results
None listed