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Parent training skills and methadone maintenance: clinical opportunities and challenges
S Dawe1, P H Harnett, P Staiger
1School of Applied Psychology, Griffith University, Mt Gravatt Campus, Queensland 4111, Brisbane, Australia. s.dawe@mailbox.gu.edu.au
Insights
Parenting interventions can help children of parents with substance use disorders. Improving parent-child relationships through behavioral programs, potentially during methadone treatment, may reduce behavioral issues.
Area of Science:
- Child Psychology
- Addiction Medicine
- Family Therapy
Background:
- Children in substance-abusing families often exhibit behavioral and emotional problems.
- Parent-child relationship quality is a key mediator of risk factors for child development.
- Behavioral family interventions effectively reduce child behavior problems in general populations.
Purpose of the Study:
- To explore the potential of parent training programs within substance abuse treatment settings.
- To enhance parent-child relationship quality in families affected by parental substance abuse.
- To discuss delivery and evaluation strategies for interventions in this population.
Main Methods:
- Review of existing behavioral family interventions.
- Proposal for integrating parent training into methadone replacement programs.
- Discussion of medium- to long-term intervention needs and evaluation frameworks.
Main Results:
- Systematic evaluation of such programs in substance-abusing families is lacking.
- Methadone programs offer a potential setting for delivering parent training.
- Interventions likely require long-term engagement and broader scope than just parent-child relations.
Conclusions:
- Parent training programs integrated into substance abuse treatment, like methadone programs, show promise.
- These interventions need to be medium to long-term and address multifaceted issues.
- Further research on delivery and evaluation models is crucial for effective implementation.
Abstract:
Children raised in substance abusing families show high rates of behavioural and emotional problems, in particular oppositional, defiant and non-compliant behaviours. While a range of social and individual factors correlate with poor parenting, it is often the quality of the parent-child relationship that mediates the effects of most other risk factors on child development. By addressing this relationship using behavioural family interventions, child behaviour problems have been reduced in multiple problem families. However, there has been little attempt to systematically evaluate such programs in substance abusing families. It is argued that methadone replacement programs provide a window of opportunity to deliver well-validated parent training programs that enhance the quality of parent-child relations. However, it is likely that such programs would need to be medium to long term and address issues beyond parent child relationships. How such interventions may be delivered and evaluated is discussed.