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Emotion Focused Family Therapy for Parents of Children With Mental Health Difficulties
Sponsor: University of Guelph
Summary
Emotion Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) is a promising intervention that aims to teach parents advanced skills to support their child's development of emotion skills and increase their adaptive behaviours, potentially leading to improvements in their child's psychological functioning and family functioning more broadly. This randomized controlled trial (RCT; EFFT vs waitlist control) will (1) test the efficacy of a 6-week group EFFT program on parent and child outcomes and (2) examine maintenance of treatment gains up to four months post-intervention.
Official title: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Emotion Focused Family Therapy for Parents of Children With Mental Health Difficulties
Key Details
Gender
All
Age Range
7 Years - 15 Years
Study Type
INTERVENTIONAL
Enrollment
200
Start Date
2022-10-11
Completion Date
2027-03
Last Updated
2026-01-23
Healthy Volunteers
No
Conditions
Interventions
Emotion Focused Family Therapy
The Emotion Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) intervention for this study will be delivered to groups of four to ten parents over six weekly sessions of two hours each. The goal of EFFT is to teach and empower parents to coach their child to process the emotions at the source of their mental health symptoms, to increase their child's adaptive behaviours, and to repair emotional injuries within the parent-child relationship. EFFT also targets parents' own emotional challenges that may prevent them from feeling capable or being able to support their child's treatment. Each EFFT session will include introductions, psychoeducation about emotion and psychopathology, introduction of skills, experiential activities (e.g., chair work), open discussion and feedback, and homework activities covering the foci of EFFT: emotion coaching, behaviour coaching, therapeutic apology, and parental emotion blocks.
Locations (1)
Maplewoods Centre for Family Therapy and Child Psychology, University of Guelph
Guelph, Ontario, Canada