Outpatient Treatment of Children and Adolescents Using Emotion-Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) Caregiver Workshops: A Pre- to Postintervention Evaluation

Caregiver participation in their child’s treatment for mental health difficulties can lead to improvements in the child’s emotion processing and mental health symptoms. Emotion-focused family therapy (EFFT) is a transdiagnostic treatment model designed to help caregivers actively support their child’s treatment. Three of EFFT’s aims are to (1) increase caregiver’s confidence in their ability to enact strategies supporting recovery, (2) improve caregiver’s awareness about their own reactions to their child’s needs, and (3) provide caregivers with behavioral and emotion-focused skills to support their child at home. We examined the short-term impact of group-based manualized 2-day EFFT caregiver workshops delivered in person from 2017 to 2020 to 463 caregivers of children and adolescents seeking community outpatient services. Before and after the workshop, caregivers completed questionnaires assessing caregiver self-efficacy, emotion blocks, reflective functioning, perceptions of their child’s emotion regulation and mental health challenges. Quantitative and qualitative workshop satisfaction data were collected. Accounting for caregiver clustering, effects from paired t tests for differences in mean scores before and immediately after the intervention revealed the following: (a) increases in caregiver self-efficacy (d = 1.23) although internal consistency of scale scores was low in our sample; (b) small improvements in caregiver perceptions of the child’s mental health difficulties (d = .26), particularly externalizing (d = .32) and conduct (d = .36) problems; and (c) small improvements in caregiver perceptions of their child’s negative affect and changeable/extreme moods (d = .23). These results, combined with high levels of caregiver satisfaction, suggest EFFT caregiver workshops may be an efficient, cost and resource effective intervention option for caregivers of children experiencing mental health difficulties.