The effectiveness of the Incredible Years® parent training programs

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 reinforce 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. Combining survey data on more than 1200 Danish families with register-based data, three studies were conducted as part of my PhD-project.

In the first study, a benchmark analysis found that the Danish implementation of the Incredible Years Parent Training Programs achieved similar or larger pre-to-posttest effects on parent-reported disruptive child behaviors compared to European effectiveness RCTs.

The second study found applied a cumulative risk and equivalence test paradigm and concluded that families benefitted equally well from the intervention across socioeconomic characteristics and across low to moderate levels of socioeconomic risk.

The third study used a propensity score matching procedure and concluded that Danish families participating in the intervention were continuously economically disadvantaged compared to other Danish families and to families with similar socioeconomic backgrounds regardless of participation in the Incredible Years Parent Training, suggested that disruptive child behaviors may impose financial strain in families from early childhood and into adolescence.

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 

Support group members:

Marie Stegger Sørenden, Centerchef, Center for ADHD
Birgitte Færregaard, Specialkonsulent, Social- og Boligstyrelsen


Postdoc project:

Parent training: differential benefit and longterm child outcomes

Supported by a grant from Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF) under the call “Strengthened research on vulnerable children and youth and poor well-being”, this project will extend findings from my PhD-project on parent-training through two main paths.

One path entails a complex research design combining a large community sample of Danish, with survey data from the Danish Center for Social Science Research (VIVE) and national register-based data. This will allow for analyses of long-term differences and changes in somatic and mental health service utilization for children with high levels of disruptive behaviors compared to children with normal levels of disruptive child behaviors (Study 1). Also, it will allow us to examine long-term differences and changes in school-related characteristics of children with and without behavior problems, such as school start age, utilization of special education services, school absence, etc. (Study 2). In both studies, we will additionally test a hypothesis of beneficial long-term secondary effects of participation in evidence-based parent-training on the outcomes.

The second path of the project delves into the Danish Incredible Years implementation dataset to address a general lack of knowledge on the importance of child age and of having one or both parents participate as predictors of differential change. This study represents a rare opportunity to examine patterns of symptom change from pre- to posttest in the light of child age across a large age-span from 2 to 12 years, as well as a uniquely high number of children in the sample with two participating parents (Study 3).

Keywords:

Health outcomes, school outcomes, long-term secondary outcomes, disruptive child behaviors, evidence-based parent-training

Head of Project:

Tea Trillingsgaard

Other associates:

Lea Tangelev Greve, Mette Lausten (VIVE)

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