Parent-child relationship outcomes of the Incredible Years Parents and Babies Program: A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial
Article Category: Research Article
Published Online: Jun 07, 2022
Page range: 40 - 52
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/sjcapp-2022-0004
Keywords
© 2022 Maiken Pontoppidan, Mette Thorsager, Tine Steenhof, published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Background
A warm, sensitive, and responsive relationship to a caregiver is essential for healthy child development.
Objective
This paper examines the effects of the Incredible Years Parents and Babies (IYPB) program on the parent-child relationship at post-intervention when offered as a universal parenting intervention to parents with newborn infants.
Method
We conducted a pragmatic, two-arm, parallel pilot randomized controlled trial; 112 families with newborns were randomized to IYPB intervention (
Results
There were no significant intervention effects on either the total score or any of the seven subscales at post-intervention when the children were around 5.5 months old. For parental sensitivity, results were significant at the 10% level, favoring the IYPB group. When examining the lowest-functioning mothers in moderator analyses, we also found no significant differences between the two groups.
Conclusion
In line with parent-report outcomes, we did not find any statistically significant differences between the IYPB program and usual care on parent-child relationship when offered as a universal intervention for a relatively well-functioning group of parents with infants in a setting with a high standard of usual care. However, there was a positive trend for the total score, parental sensitivity and reciprocity with effect sizes in the range of .41-.51. It is possible that a larger sample would have resulted in significant differences for these outcomes.
Trial registration
ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01931917 (registration date August 27, 2013)