BACKGROUND: Adolescent mental health issues are highly prevalent across the world, with international rates ranging from 10% to 20%. Adolescent mental health issues have far-reaching and potentially long-lasting effects on adolescents themselves, their families, and the wider community. However, reducing the prevalence of adolescent mental health issues is only one part of addressing life-long risk and poor outcomes. It is equally as important to promote social, psychological, and self-regulatory skills and attributes that allow adolescents to become successful learners, build healthy relationships, and become healthy and productive contributors to their families and communities. The family context and parenting are two key targets for intervention to both reduce detrimental outcomes and enhance positive outcomes for adolescents. Yet there has been a lack of synthesis of the evidence for parenting interventions for adolescents.
OBJECTIVES: This Campbell Collaboration systematic review aims to synthesise evidence from randomised controlled trials regarding the effectiveness of parenting interventions for improving mental health and resilience outcomes for adolescents, as well as the adolescent-parent relationship.
METHODS: Standard Campbell Collaboration methodological procedures were followed across all stages of the review, as guided by the published protocol for the review.
RESULTS: This presentation will present the findings of the systematic review, using a mixture of meta-analyses and single effect sizes to synthesise the impact of parenting interventions across different domains of adolescent mental health, adolescent resilience, and measures of the adolescent-parent relationship. Subgroup and sensitivity analyses will be used to explore how the effectiveness of parenting interventions varies by different moderators (e.g., type of clinical population, intervention setting, and/or the sociodemographic characteristics of adolescents and parent participants).
CONCLUSIONS: This systematic review has direct relevance to policy across the globe. Child and adolescent health and/or mental health policies (e.g., WHO's Global Accelerated Action Plan for the Health of Adolescents) emphasise the importance of the adolescent period as a critical transition point in the prevention and treatment of mental health issues and the promotion of health and wellbeing. This review results will provide a robust synthesis of the evidence-base for whether parenting interventions are effective within this critical phase of development.