The Mental Elf | January 2022 | Why doesn’t parent involvement help treat children with anxiety?
The Mental Elf has produced a blog post which provides a summary of a research paper that reviews therapy targets, techniques and outcomes. The authors consider the following questions:
“If specific aspects of parenting link so clearly to youth anxiety, what do we make of the fact that involving parents more actively in treatment does not appear to improve outcomes?
Are we targeting the wrong family features, using the wrong strategies to get at them, or perhaps not addressing them with sufficient intensity?”
Highlights
•Family-focused treatments for anxiety vary in format and approach and it remains unclear whether they offer an advantage over individual child treatment.
•We used meta-analytic methods to examine the therapeutic approaches described in existing family interventions, whether they mapped to identified mechanisms, and the timeline along which they were measured.
•Of 11 identified randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that included a youth anxiety measure at pre- and post-treatment, only half included a family functioning measure at both pre- and post-treatment.
•Only a single study included anxiety measures at a mid-treatment time point, and none included parent measures at a mid-treatment time point.
•Findings are discussed in terms of design considerations and advancing the field of family intervention for youth anxiety
Abstract
Parent- and family-level correlates of youth anxiety are well-documented, and they highlight potential targets for family-focused intervention. Although family-based approaches for treating youth anxiety generally are considered efficacious for achieving symptom reduction, they vary in format and approach and it remains unclear whether they offer an advantage over individual child treatment. To better understand the current state of the evidence, we used meta-analytic methods to examine the therapeutic approaches described in existing family interventions for child and adolescent anxiety, whether they mapped to the major mechanisms proposed in the literature, and the timeline along which relevant parent/family variables were measured. We examined how these mechanism-focused family interventions performed in RCTs relative to individual child CBT and whether they shifted symptoms and relevant parenting behaviors. A total of 11 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) compared individual cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) to CBT+ a family component (CBT + FAM) and included a youth anxiety measure at pre- and post-treatment; only half of these ( n equal to 6) also included a parent/family functioning measure at both pre- and post-treatment (across both primary and secondary outcome papers). Only a single study included anxiety measures at a mid-treatment time point, and none included parent measures at a mid-treatment time point. Findings are discussed in terms of design considerations and advancing the field of family intervention for youth anxiety.
Family Intervention for Child and Adolescent Anxiety: A Meta-analytic Review of Therapy Targets, Techniques, and Outcomes [primary paper]
Mental Elf Why doesn’t parent involvement help treat children with anxiety?
Mental Health News 