Evaluating the Impact of the How‐to Parenting Program on Child Mental Health: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Grade Schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The How-to Parenting Program teaches parents how to provide autonomy support, structure, and affiliation, the three components of the parenting style shown to be beneficial for children's mental health. Using a waitlist RCT, we assessed its impact on school-aged children's externalizing and internalizing problems. We also tested whether family composition, participating parents' gender, child age, sex, and baseline mental health modified its effects. Parents (N = 293; 80.20% mothers) were randomly assigned to the French version of the 7-week program or a waitlist condition (i.e., immediate delivery vs. end of study). Parents rated child externalizing and internalizing problems before and after program delivery, as well as 6 and 12 months later. Controlling for unbalanced covariates and baseline levels of problems, multilevel multivariate analyses revealed that compared to the waitlist, the How-to Parenting Program led to greater decreases in children's externalizing problems immediately after program delivery and that this benefit was sustained over at least 6 months. However, decreases in children's internalizing problems were similar across both conditions. Considering this RCT's methodological strengths (e.g., intent-to-treat analyses) and limitations (e.g., intervention diffusion), along with the floor effects inherent to our universal prevention approach, the How-to Parenting Program's benefits, though small in size, indicate that it could prove an effective public mental health prevention strategy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".