Evaluating the Impact of the How‐to Parenting Program on Child Mental Health: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Grade Schools




Joussemet, Mireille; Mageau, Geneviève A.; Larose, Marie‐Pier; Robichaud, Jean‐Michel; Dufour, Sarah; Vitaro, Frank; Koestner, Richard

PublisherWiley

2025

Family Process

e70081

64

4

0014-7370

1545-5300

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1111/famp.70081

https://doi.org/10.1111/famp.70081

https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/505186306



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.


This work was supported by Canadian Institutes of Health Research (130576) and registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT03030352).


Last updated on 2025-07-11 at 14:59