NCT05603000

Emotion Focused Family Therapy for Parents of Children With Mental Health Difficulties

A Randomized Controlled Trial of Emotion Focused Family Therapy for Parents of Children With Mental Health Difficulties

• Status: Recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 200 (estimated)
• Sponsor: University of Guelph · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 7 Years – 15 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

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.

Detailed description

This randomized controlled trial (RCT) will test the efficacy of a 6-week Emotion Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) group program on parent and child outcomes, compared to a waitlist control. Families will be randomized to either the EFFT group treatment or a waitlist. The RCT will evaluate changes in parent functioning, child functioning, and parent-child relationship functioning. A 4-month follow-up will test whether any changes from pre-to-post intervention are maintained at 4 months. The RCT will also test proposed mechanisms of change (parent-child relationship quality, family functioning) and moderators of treatment effectiveness (parental stress).

Conditions

• Anxiety
• Depression
• Behavior Problem

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	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.

Timeline

• Start date: 2022-10-11
• Primary completion: 2027-03-01
• Completion: 2027-03-01
• First posted: 2022-11-02
• Last updated: 2026-01-23

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Canada