A new preventive intervention for children of substance‐abusing parents: Results of a randomized controlled trial

Abstract

Children of substance-abusing parents (COS) are at risk for developing psychosocial problems. We evaluated the effectiveness of the manualized, 9-session psychoeducational preventive intervention "TRAMPOLINE" (PE) for 8-12-year-old COS compared with a non-educational "fun and play" group (NE) of equal length delivered by social workers in 27 German counselling centres. A randomized controlled trial was conducted to compare PE (n = 130) and NE (n = 88) outcomes at baseline, post intervention, and 6-month follow-up. Primary outcomes were related to stress and coping; secondary were also examined. Analyses were conducted using baseline-adjusted repeated measures linear mixed models. Five outcomes revealed improvements both in PE and NE, four of which were more pronounced in PE, and one more pronounced in NE. Small but significant group differences in favour of PE were found in "social isolation" and "addiction-related knowledge." Children from both groups reported reduced mental distress, reduced avoidance in coping with family stress, improved self-perceived autonomy, and a better parent-child relationship. No changes were observed in self-efficacy, physical stress symptoms, and in other health-related quality of life aspects. TRAMPOLINE can instill positive changes in COS by reducing mental distress and social isolation.

Psychosocial Interventions to Improve Psychological, Social and Physical Wellbeing in Family Members Affected by an Adult Relative’s Substance Use: A Systematic Search and Review of the Evidence

“…One trial randomly assigned children aged 8–12 years old whose parent had a substance use disorder to a psychoeducational intervention or non-educational play and fun sessions. The psychoeducational intervention was not found to result in better mental wellbeing, coping, self-perceived autonomy, or parent–child relationship than non-educational play, with both groups making improvements [ 32 ]. Evidence of a reduction in participant anger was reported at 2 months post treatment in a trial of emotional intelligence group training as compared to wait-list control for adolescent boys of fathers with an opiate use disorder [ 33 ].…”

Community-based support for children who are next-of-kin for a parent experiencing illness or disability – a scoping review

“…Of the articles with a quantitative design, three of them described the results from randomized controlled trials [28][29][30] and one used a two-arm pre-and postintervention [31]. Two observational studies also had a pre-post design [32,33] as did one [34] of the two mixedmethod articles [34,35].…”

“…The various interventions for children were described in the articles as: preventive education interventions to prevent psychosocial problems, psychopathology and to help cope and ease difficult feelings related to being a next-of-kin of a parent having an illness [30,32,33,42] and peer support alone or as a 4 weeks intervention program within the school holiday and/or an after school programme [32,42]. Some were described as a psychosocial support programme [43,44] and one as an internet café [38], while others were reported as having digitized some components [40].…”

“…The included articles reported about a range of outcome measures (Table 2). The majority of these aimed to measure burden on the child, in terms of the impact of parental illness [37], health-related quality of life [30], emotional problems [29], stress [30], anxiety [31,41], depression [31], sleep behaviours, eating habits [41], selfconcept [30], self-esteem [32], and cognition [29]. The child's social functioning was measured in some studies, in terms of behavioural problems in the child [29], connections and relationship problems [32], and interactions with schoolmates and school performance [41].…”

“…Furthermore, some studies used coping as an outcome measure of the intervention. This concept was defined differently depending on the use of various instruments, such as coping [30], coping skills [31], adolescent coping orientation to problem experiences [33], help-seeking [34], perceived competence [29] and communicationboth general communication [31] and communication about illness [41]. The child's social support was also used as an outcome measure [29].…”