Traditional Workshop 6 - Pumping up Parents: How to Use Evidence-based Parenting Tools to Build Caregiver Confidence, Affirm Family Values, and Increase Skills

Parents play an integral role in the lives of their children and often significantly impact both family dynamics and the trajectory of a child’s mental health. Unfortunately, parents are bombarded with messages about how they “should” raise their children, often leaving them disheartened, confused, or carrying a sense of inadequacy. Fortunately, mental health providers have the opportunity to guide parents towards effective tools in a way that promotes caregiver confidence, affirms family values, and increases skills use. With a heavy emphasis on live role-play demonstrations, this workshop will highlight a number of core strategies to help caregivers more effectively engage in mental health treatment to support their child and create sustainable change at home. The presenters will provide insight from a range of cognitive-behavioral therapy perspectives, including Dialectical Behavior Therapy, exposure-based treatment approaches, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and Behavior Management. Through a series of role-plays, the presenters will weave in a combination of strategies aimed at supporting parents in meaningful participation in treatment, improved parental emotion regulation, and increased ability to support youth as they navigate identity and independence. Specific areas of focus will include (1) early treatment work to understand family values and align them with treatment goals (2) parental emotion identification (3) parent coping skills, (4) validating a child’s experience as they navigate identity development, (5) parental scaffolding as youth build independence. Audience members will have an opportunity to discuss each role play and ask questions. The workshop presenters will then guide audience participants to practice these strategies in small-group role plays work to better hone their understanding of the interventions presented in the workshop.

Recommended Reading 1: Maliken, A. C., & Katz, L. F. (2013). Exploring the impact of parental psychopathology and emotion regulation on evidence-based parenting interventions: A transdiagnostic approach to improving treatment effectiveness. Clinical child and family psychology review, 16, 173-186.

Recommended Reading 2: Fasulo, S.J., & Waugh, W.E. (2024).  The Family Time-Out:  A trans-diagnostic, family-level intervention protocol to reduce harmful conflict.  APSAC Advisor, 37(3), 36-47.

Recommended Reading 3: Waugh, W.E., and Fasulo, S.J. (2024).  Goals, objectives, and implementation structure of a family time-out intervention.  APSAC Advisor, 37(3), 48-59.

Recommended Reading 4: Zalewski, M., Maliken, A. C., Lengua, L. J., Martin, C. G., Roos, L. E., & Everett, Y. (2020). Integrating dialectical behavior therapy with child and parent training interventions: A narrative and theoretical review. Clinical psychology: Science and practice.

Recommended Reading 5: Raftery, J. H., Moore, P, Palm, K & Coyne, L. W. (2016). Changing problematic parent-child interaction in child anxiety disorders: The promise of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 5(1), 64-69.