NCT07419308

A Male Caregiver Adaptation Study of the Connecting and Reflecting Experience Parenting Program

• Status: Enrolling By Invitation
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 7 (estimated)
• Sponsor: Montefiore Medical Center · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Male caregivers play a critical role in children's emotional development, yet they are often underrepresented in parenting interventions and may experience unique barriers to emotional engagement and support. This study will evaluate whether a 12-session parenting group therapy program is feasible, acceptable, and appropriate for male-identifying caregivers of children and adolescents receiving mental health services. The intervention being studied is the Connecting and Reflecting Experience (CARE) parenting program, a mentalizing-focused group therapy designed to strengthen caregivers' ability to reflect on their own and their child's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. CARE has demonstrated promise in improving parental reflective functioning, reducing parenting stress, and enhancing parent-child relationships in prior studies, but has not yet been evaluated in a group composed exclusively of male-identifying caregivers. Participants will take part in a 12-session weekly CARE group delivered via telehealth, with each session lasting one hour. Participants will also be asked to complete brief self-report surveys before, during, and after participation in the group. The purpose of the study is to inform future intervention development and determine whether CARE is a useful intervention for groups of male caregivers.

Conditions

• Parenting Stress
• Parent Child Relationship
• Father-Child Relations
• Emotional Regulation
• Fathers

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Connecting and Reflecting Experience (CARE) Program	The intervention consists of weekly one-hour mentalizing-focused parenting group sessions with up to seven male-identifying caregivers per group and one to two trained facilitators. CARE is a therapy focused on parents' reflective capacity, or the ability to consider how our own and our children's thoughts, feelings, intentions, and other mental states shape behavior and parent-child relationships.

Timeline

• Start date: 2026-03-19
• Primary completion: 2026-07-01
• Completion: 2026-07-01
• First posted: 2026-02-19
• Last updated: 2026-03-23

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States