The Impact of Parent Behavior-Management Training on Child Depressive Symptoms

Webster-Stratton, C., & Herman, K. C. (2008). The impact of parent behavior-management training on child depressive symptoms. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 55(4), 473-484. 

Child depression is a serious public health burden without any currently accepted empirically supported treatments. Given the dire consequences of life-course persistent depression and the developmental roots of depression in childhood, effective treatments and prevention strategies are urgently needed. The parent behavior-management intervention used in the present study is a widely used and accepted treatment. Given mounting pressures toward time-limited therapy and the widely accepted high rates of co-occurring behavior problems in children, clinicians and researchers welcome any evidence that single interventions can promote change in multiple problem areas. Current evidence suggests that the parent behavior-management program tested in this study offers a viable treatment for reducing depressive symptoms in young children.

The present study tested the impact of a parent behavior-management intervention on child depressive and internalizing symptoms. One hundred eighty-one children were randomly assigned to receive a videotape modeling parenting intervention, the Incredible Years, or to a wait-list control group. Children who received the intervention were more likely to have lower mother-rated mood and internalizing symptoms at post-treatment, compared with children in a wait-list control group. The effect sizes observed in the present intervention fell in the small-to-medium range for the sample as a whole, and some evidence supported the authors’ hypothesis that effects would be strongest for children with baseline internalizing symptoms in the clinical range. Subsequent analyses also revealed that perceived changes in parenting effectiveness mediated the effect of treatment on children’s post-treatment internalizing symptoms. The finding was consistent with study hypotheses and social learning explanations of child internalizing symptoms that guided selection of putative mechanisms. Implications for counseling psychologists and for designing interventions and prevention strategies for children with internalizing symptoms are discussed.

Read the article (PDF)