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Published on: January 12, 2018
The Incredible Years Parents and Babies Program: A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial
Maiken Pontoppidan1,2, Sihu K Klest3, Tróndur Møller Sandoy1
1SFI-The Danish National Centre for Social Research, Department for Child and Family, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Insights
The Incredible Years Parents and Babies (IYPB) program showed no overall benefits as a universal intervention for infant parents. However, it reduced stress for high-functioning mothers but increased it for low-functioning mothers.
Area of Science:
- Child Development
- Parenting Interventions
- Mental Health
Background:
- Early childhood experiences significantly impact lifelong mental health.
- Adverse infant experiences can lead to immediate and long-term issues.
- The Incredible Years Parents and Babies (IYPB) program was evaluated as a universal intervention.
Purpose of the Study:
- To assess the effectiveness of the IYPB program when offered universally to parents of newborns.
- To determine the program's impact on parenting confidence and stress levels.
- To explore secondary outcomes including parent health and parent-child relationship dynamics.
Main Methods:
- A pragmatic, two-arm, parallel pilot randomized controlled trial was conducted.
- 112 families with newborns were randomized to the IYPB program (76) or usual care (36).
- Primary outcomes included parenting confidence and stress at 20 weeks, with secondary outcomes on parent and infant well-being.
Main Results:
- No significant intervention effects were observed for primary outcomes (parenting confidence, stress).
- Intervention mothers reported a smaller social network compared to controls.
- Lowest-functioning mothers experienced increased stress and lower confidence; highest-functioning mothers reported reduced stress.
Conclusions:
- The IYPB program, as a universal intervention, did not demonstrate overall effectiveness for parents with infants.
- The program may require adaptation for universal groups, as it was designed for low-functioning families.
- Future research should consider targeted delivery of IYPB to groups with similar parenting and mental health profiles.
Introduction:
Infancy is an important period of life; adverse experiences during this stage can have both immediate and lifelong impacts on the child's mental health and well-being. This study evaluates the effects of offering the Incredible Years Parents and Babies (IYPB) program as a universal intervention.
Method:
We conducted a pragmatic, two-arm, parallel pilot randomized controlled trial; 112 families with newborns were randomized to the IYPB program (76) or usual care (36) with a 2:1 allocation ratio. The primary outcome was parenting confidence at 20 weeks(Karitane Parenting Confidence Scale and Parental Stress Scale). Secondary outcomes include measures of parent health, parent-child relationship, infant development, parent-child activities, and network. Interviewers and data analysts were blind to allocation status. Multiple linear-regression analyses were used for evaluating the effects of the intervention.
Results:
There were no intervention effects on the primary outcomes. Only one effect was detected for secondary outcomes, intervention mothers reported a significantly smaller network than control mothers (β = -0.15 [-1.85,-0.28]). When examining the lowest-functioning mothers in moderator analyses, we found that intervention mothers reported significantly higher parent stress (β = 5.33 [0.27,10.38]), lower parenting confidence (β = -2.37 [-4.45,-0.29]), and worse mental health than control mothers (β = -18.62 [-32.40,-4.84]). In contrast, the highest functioning intervention mothers reported significantly lower parent stress post-intervention (β = -6.11 [-11.07,-1.14]).
Conclusion:
Overall, we found no effects of the IYPB as a universal intervention for parents with infants. The intervention was developed to be used with groups of low functioning families and may need to be adapted to be effective with universal parent groups. The differential outcomes for the lowest and highest functioning families suggest that future research should evaluate the effects of delivering the IYPB intervention to groups of parents who have similar experiences with parenting and mental health.
Trial Registration:
ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01931917.
