Parenting Skills and Parent Readiness for Treatment Are Associated With Child Disruptive Behavior and Parent Participation in Treatment

Using Observational Assessment to Help Identify Factors Associated with Parent Participation Engagement in Community-Based Child Mental Health Services

“…Specifically, this study's findings regarding the child/family-level correlates are consistent with past literature identifying family ethnicity, child service use, and clinical characteristics as significant correlates with PPE in MH services (Dumas and Albin 1986; Fawley-King et al 2012). In addition, aspects of parent motivation to participate in treatment have been associated with greater PPE (Andrade et al 2015; Nock and Kazdin 2005), which is consistent with this study's finding that parent perceptions regarding their ability to change their parenting skills may be linked to greater observed PPE. Therefore, family sociodemographics, child clinical attributes, and parent attitudes represent potentially important targets to impact PPE in children's MH services.…”

“…Several parent/family factors were found to be associated with PPE, including: parent age, socioeconomic status, parent treatment attendance, parent attitudes towards their child's mental health treatment, parent psychopathology, referral source to mental health treatment, and parenting behaviors (Chamberlain et al 1984; Dumas and Albin 1986; Hansen and Warner 1994; Fawley-King et al 2012; Nock and Kazdin 2005; Jensen and Grimes 2010; Podell and Kendall 2011; Stoolmiller et al 1993). Not available for the Haine-Schlagel and Walsh (2015) PPE review, two recent studies uniquely identified that negative parent beliefs about their child's symptoms (Pereira et al 2015) and specific beliefs about readiness to engage in treatment (Andrade et al 2015) were associated with PPE. Finally, Haine-Schlagel and Walsh (2015) noted that limited attention has been paid to therapist-level characteristics associated with PPE.…”

Factors related to parental pre-treatment motivation in outpatient child and adolescent mental health care

“…These studies also investigated child factors in relation to parents' pre-treatment motivation. Higher symptom severity was found to be related to higher parental pre-treatment motivation, as reported in a study among 197 adolescents when entering home-based treatment services for a variety of mental health problems [18] and in two studies of children who were referred to a mental health clinic for behavioural problems [19,20].…”

“…Also, higher parental stress was related to a higher level of parental pre-treatment motivation (i.e., treatment readiness, readiness to change) [18,19]. Furthermore, poorer parenting skills (i.e., higher levels of inconsistent disciplining and poor supervision) were associated with higher parental motivation (i.e., treatment readiness) for receiving parenting treatment for parents of children with behavioural problems [20]. These studies also investigated child factors in relation to parents' pre-treatment motivation.…”

“…The sparse literature about factors related to parents' treatment motivation prior to starting treatment in child and adolescent mental health care has important shortcomings: studies often consisted of small sample sizes, considered only a limited number of factors and focused predominantly on children with externalising problem behaviour rather than on the broad scope of problems of children and adolescents referred to mental health services [3,17,[19][20][21]. Also, weaknesses in the various measures of motivation for treatment may be noted, e.g., rating scales with low internal consistency, a low number of items or open-ended questions [3,17,21].…”