An emotion-focused parenting program for parents of children with chronic illness: a pilot study

© 2017 Dr. Wai Wai YangParents play a critical role in socializing children’s emotional experiences which contribute to children’s emotional, social and behavioural functioning. However, when children have chronic illness, more emotionally intense and distressing situations can impact parents and their children. This PhD used a mixed-method approach to examine the feasibility, acceptability and outcome of an emotion-focused parenting program, Tuning in to Kids (TIK), for parents of school-aged children with chronic illness when compared to standard paediatric care at 3-month follow-up. Participants were 52 parent-child dyads (intervention = 27, 51.9%) recruited from the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne. Outcomes were obtained from observation of an emotion discussion task as well as parent-reported and child-reported questionnaires. The individually delivered TIK was well attended with high satisfaction and acceptance for its contents and format. Qualitatively, intervention parents reported increased emotional knowledge, awareness and acceptance of their children’s emotions and their own, as well as learning emotion regulation and coaching skills while understanding and reflecting more on their parenting. When compared to a standard paediatric care control group at follow-up using ANCOVA, results showed that parental emotion socialization skills improved with large effect sizes for intervention parents as their emotion coaching increased while emotion dismissing reduced. Intervention parents also reported increased acceptance of negative emotions, better sense of parenting competence and less difficulties in their emotion regulation. Children of intervention parents also showed an improving trend in their socio-emotional functioning. Overall, findings suggest that TIK is a promising intervention for parents of children with chronic illness