Short summary

Considering the important impact of the quality of the parent-child relationship on the child's wellbeing, it is essential to target it in interventions and to investigate the relation with psychiatric symptoms. Generally there is a lack of interventions aiming to improve parental sensitivity in child populations referred to psychiatric services . This target group is very important, as there is evidence indicating that insecure attachment is tightly connected to psychopathology. Working with the parents to become more responsive to their children, might have an important impact on the children's psychiatric symptoms and could additionally prevent future psychopathologies. 

Rationale

Background:The quality of attachment is greatly influenced by parental sensitivity. Attachment based interventions are designed to promote parental sensitivity, to change parental mental representations and to improve understanding of the developmental needs of the child. Very few studies have investigated the effect of attachment-based interventions on psychiatric symptoms in children. Targeting parental sensitivity and the parent-child interaction might have an important impact on psychiatric symptoms in a clinical sample of children referred to child psychiatric services.

Objectives: The primary objective is to investigate whether Circle of Security-Parenting (COS-P) has an effect on parental sensitivity in parents of children referred to child psychiatric services. The secondary objectives are to investigate the effect on children's behavioral and emotional symptoms and the parental stress and reflective functioning after 10 weeks of intervention and at the 24 week follow-up. The study is also exploring the effect of parental attachment style, parental stress and parental psychopathology on the effect of the intervention.

Methods: The trial will include 128 families of children (age 3-8 years) who are referred to child psychiatric services in a randomized and controlled design. Included families will be randomized to COS-P+ Treatment as Usual (TAU) or TAU only.

Perspectives: Considering the important impact of the quality of the parent-child relationship on the child's well-being, it is essential to target it in interventions and to investigate the relation with psychiatric symptoms. Generally there is a lack of interventions targeting parental sensitivity in psychiatric child populations. Working with the parents on the child-parent relation, might have an important impact on their children's current psychiatric symptoms and could additionally prevent future psychopathology.

Description of the cohort

Children referred to psychiatric services (age range 3-8 years)

Data and biological material

Questionnaires and video data 

Collaborating researchers and departments

Department of Economics and Business, National Centre for Register?based Research, Aarhus University,

• Professor Søren Dalsgaard, MD, PhD, 

Child Study Centre, Yale School of Medicine, Yale University, USA

• Professor James Leckman, MD, PhD

Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, UK

• Professor Peter Fonagy, PhD

Departement of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stony Brooke College, USA

• Associate Professor James Swain