Early impact of the BEST intervention for parents stressed by adolescent substance abuse

Abstract

Youth involvement in substance abuse can be a source of considerable distress for their parents. Unilateral family interventions have been advocated as one means by which concerned family members can be supported to assist substance‐abusing family members. To date there has been little research examining the impact of unilateral family interventions on the directly participating family members. In this study the early impact of an 8‐week parent‐group programme known as Behavioural Exchange Systems Training (BEST) was evaluated using a quasi‐experimental, waiting list control design. The professionally led programme had been developed to support and assist parents in their efforts to cope with adolescent substance abuse. Subjects were 66 parents (48 families) accepted for entry into the programme between 1997 and 1998. Comparison was made between 46 parents offered immediate entry into the programme and 20 parents whose entry to the programme was delayed by an 8‐week waiting list. At the first assessment 87% of parents showed elevated mental health symptoms on the General Health Questionnaire. Evidence suggested exposure to the intervention had a positive impact on parents. Compared to parents on the waiting list, parents entered immediately into the intervention demonstrated greater reductions in mental health symptoms, increased parental satisfaction, and increased use of assertive parenting behaviours. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The development, dissemination and evaluation of a psychoeducational parenting program for use within the adolescent drug and alcohol treatment field

“…These include poor family management (poor use of guidelines, monitoring, rewards, discipline); harsh parenting (including physical punishment or verbal reprimands); poor parental modelling; negative child-parent relationship (including hostility, conflict); ineffective control; permissiveness; lack of parental warmth, connectedness and bonding; poor communication; favourable parent attitudes to substance use; and antisocial behaviour (Bamberg, Toumbourou, Blyth & Forer, 2001;Griffin, Botvin, Scheier, Diaz & Miller, 2002;Hawkins et al, 1992;Kumpfer, Alvarado & Whiteside, 2003;McGillicuddy et al, 2001;Stone et al, 2012 ).…”

“…Treatment approaches such as Multidimensional family therapy (Liddle, 2002;Liddle et al, 2004a;2004b), Multisystemic Treatment (MST) (Henggeler et al, 1991;Henggeler, Clingempeel, Brondino & Pickrel, 2002), and Behavioural Exchange Systems Therapy (BEST) (Toumborou, Blyth, Bamberg, Bowes & Douvas, 1997;Toumbourou et al, 2001) have all rigorously demonstrated the clear advantages of involving family in the treatment of adolescent substance misuse and other behavioural problems, such as juvenile crime . Family-focused interventions, whether systemic in nature, or a combination of behavioural, cognitive-behavioural, or focused on parenting skills, parent training, parent education or counselling-oriented, have all demonstrated to have effect sizes two to nine times greater than child onlyfocused interventions (Kumpfer, Alvardo & Whiteside, 2003;Latimer et al, 2003;Liddle et al, 2004 ).…”

“…Unilateral family therapy approaches (Szapocznik et al, 1983;Thomas, Adams, Yoshioka & Ager, 1990;Toumbourou et al, 2001) use a systemic model; however what separates this style from traditional systemic approaches and the multisystemic approaches, is that it is typically conducted with the often more motivated concerned family member/s, without needing all family members to be present, including the problematic drinker/substance user.…”

“…To date, outcomes from a small number of researchers investigating UFT have been positive, including significant positive effects on the psychological functioning and wellbeing of parents in their parenting role (Toumbourou et al, 2001) and improvements in treatment initiation by the user (Barber & Gilbertson, 1996;Szapocznik et al, 1983).…”

“…Parents may see themselves as failures and grieve the loss of their parenting influence and control (Oreo & Ozgul, 2007;Toumbourou, Blyth, Bamberg & Forer, 2001). Consequently, this can lead to further discouragement and battered parenting self-efficacy (Sanders and Woolley, 2005), poor emotional self-regulation, and lowered sense of personal control (Sanders & Mazzucchelli, 2013).…”