Pilot Testing an Adapted Group-Based Parent Training Program for Families with Youth in Residential Care

Background & Purpose: At any time in the US, up to 200,000 youth reside in U.S. residential treatment (RT) centers, which serve those with severe behavioral challenges unmanageable at home. Families of these youth are often involved in the child welfare system—either to access funding for RT or due to concerns of abuse or neglect—and are frequently unequipped with the resources needed to address their child’s behavioral challenges. Few parenting programs have been developed to support this population. Of these few programs, Parenting Wisely Plus (PW+) is amongst the first to be modified in a web-based format and adapted to offer peer support. The aim of the present study was to describe the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary effectiveness of PW+ on parent and family outcomes.

Methods: PW+ was previously co-designed with parents with lived experience and an advisory board of RT staff. The program includes ten web-based modules that depict common parenting challenges and teach skills such as communication, contracting, and monitoring. Over five weeks, parents complete two 20-minute modules per week and participate in a weekly 90-minute group discussion to promote skill generalization and peer support. PW+ was piloted using a single-group pre-test/post-test design with 15 parents of youth (ages 11–17) admitted to RT, recruited from one child welfare agency. Parents completed measures assessing feasibility and acceptability of PW+, along with outcomes related to social support, parenting stress, and parental self-efficacy. Family-level outcomes included household chaos and overall family functioning.

Results: Parents were on average 43 years old, women (n=13; 87%), white (n=14; 93%); their median annual income and education were <$20,000 and a high school degree. Children were an average age of 14 years old, boys (n=10; 66.7%), and had a median length-of-stay in RT of one year (SD=182.5; R=14-540). The within subjects effect sizes ranged from small to large effects across parent and family outcomes: social support (d = 0.2), parenting stress (d = 0.2), household chaos (d = -0.4), family function (d = 0.4), and parental self-efficacy (d = 0.6). Most parents reported no difficulty with completing PW+ (93%), that PW+ was very helpful (60%), and that they were overall satisfied with PW+ (67%).

Conclusions & Implications: Findings suggest preliminary effectiveness of PW+ on reducing parents stress, promoting parenting self-efficacy and positive parenting behaviors, improving the home environment, and increasing social support among parents. Findings also suggest PW+ was feasible and acceptable regarding its difficulty level, helpfulness of the content, and the influence on the discussion-based format on parent support. Future research is needed to further evaluate PW+ in larger and more diverse samples of families of youth in RT.