PROACTIVE Parent: Providing Access To Innovative & Evidence-Based Intervention

PROACTIVE Parent is an educational program designed to improve parent knowledge, capacity and confidence to more effectively manage child behavior and social and emotional needs in children with depressive symptoms. PROACTIVE Parent (Providing Access To Innovative & Evidence-Based Intervention) is a new service delivery model that uses telehealth methodology to educate parents about their child's mental health (MH) symptoms and treatment, teach parents skills to promote a safe, regulated environment for their youth, and teach parents how to work with their child's therapists to support treatment goals at home and in the community. PROACTIVE Parent will teach parents the function of child behavior, the role of symptomatology in child behaviors, and strategies to promote effective behavior management and healthy coping. Parents will also learn skills to manage their own emotional dysregulation to promote calm parental responding and promote healthy parent-child interaction and communication.

The PROACTIVE Parent model is ideally suited to promote parent's active management of child MH care. Children depend on parents to navigate a complex system of care and support children's coping in the home and community. However, parents may not know how to navigate appropriate treatments, how to communicate with their child's therapist to support treatment goals in the home, or how to interact with their child in a way that supports positive mental health outcomes. These parents require a service model that builds parent capacity to manage their child's MH care. The conceptual framework for the proposed work draws on the concept of parent activation and engagement in their child's MH care, and regulating affect. Activation refers to the parent's knowledge, capacity, and commitment to manage their child's MH care. Engagement refers to actions parents take to manage their child's care. Emotion regulation skills help parents to manage their affect, to engage in calm responding to children's needs and assist children in regulating affect.

PROACTIVE Parent is delivered in weekly 30-minute telehealth coaching sessions over the course of 10 weeks. Parent coaches use motivational interviewing and psychoeducation to improve parent activation and management of their child's MH care. Parent coaches provide parent-training and evidence-based skills training to promote effective parent behavior, healthy coping, and positive parent-child interaction. The parent coach will deliver the PROACTIVE Parent model via telehealth with supplemental online resources, using a publically available service referral system to connect parents to evidence-based treatments and MH providers if needed.

The investigators will recruit Foster Parents of youth in care aged 8 - 13 years, with symptoms or history of depression to examine acceptability, feasibility and preliminary effectiveness of the PROACTIVE Parent program.

The Aims of this project include an open trial, and exploration of the relationship between parent activation and youth MH outcomes.