Parent-child Relationship Outcomes of the Incredible Years Parents and Babies Program: A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial

BACKGROUND: A warm, sensitive, and responsive relationship to a caregiver is essential for healthy child development. OBJECTIVE: This paper examines the effects of the Incredible Years Parents and Babies (IYPB) program on the parent-child relationship at post-intervention when offered as a universal parenting intervention to parents with newborn infants. METHOD: We conducted a pragmatic, two-arm, parallel pilot randomized controlled trial; 112 families with newborns were randomized to IYPB intervention (76) or usual care (36). The IYPB program is a group intervention with eight two-hour sessions. In addition to parent-reported questionnaires, we collected a six-minute-long video at post-intervention from 97 families to assess the parent-child relationship, which was then coded with the Coding Interactive Behavior system. RESULTS: There were no significant intervention effects on either the total score or any of the seven subscales at post-intervention when the children were around 5.5 months old. For parental sensitivity, results were significant at the 10% level, favoring the IYPB group. When examining the lowest-functioning mothers in moderator analyses, we also found no significant differences between the two groups. CONCLUSION: In line with parent-report outcomes, we did not find any statistically significant differences between the IYPB program and usual care on parent-child relationship when offered as a universal intervention for a relatively well-functioning group of parents with infants in a setting with a high standard of usual care. However, there was a positive trend for the total score, parental sensitivity and reciprocity with effect sizes in the range of .41-.51. It is possible that a larger sample would have resulted in significant differences for these outcomes. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01931917 (registration date August 27, 2013)