Children with high levels of disruptive behavior often end up eliciting conflicts and negative interactions in their social surroundings. Parenting such a child can make it hard to maintain a warm and loving parenting approach and over time, and many families develop a pattern of mutual negative interactions that only reinforces the child’s disruptive behavior. In the Incredible Years parenting programs Basic and School age, parents meet with other parents in similar circumstances to share experiences as they practice new parenting techniques with the aim to break the bad cycle and reestablish a positive relation to their child.

The Incredible Years Parenting Programs have been offered in a large number of municipalities across Denmark. The data collected in these municipalities form the basis of an investigation of the short-term effect of the Incredible Years parent-training programs on child disruptive behavior in a Danish practice setting compared to international findings. We will also investigate positive longer-term family and child level effects of the program compared to a matched register-based treatment-as-usual group from non-target municipalities as well as test for sociodemographic moderators of effects.

This will, to our knowledge, be the first effectiveness study on the Incredible Years parent-training programs based on a large sample of 1000+ children as well as the first to employ outcome data from national registers in the analyses.

Keywords: parent-training, Incredible Years, disruptive behavior, conduct disorder, ADHD, parenting, coercion

Head of Project: 

Lea Tangelev Greve

Other associates:

Tea Trillingsgaard (supervisor),

Hanne Nørr Fentz (co-supervisor),

Marianne Simonsen