Emotion Focused Skills Training: Exploring the impact of a parental skills training program on parents and their children

Emotion-Focused Skills Training (EFST) for parents is an intensive, transdiagnostic program rooted in Emotion Focused Therapy and humanistic-experiential psychotherapy. It consists of a 2 days’ group training and 6 hours of individual supervision. The purpose of this dissertation was (a) to investigate the efficacy of EFST in reducing clinical levels of externalizing and internalizing symptoms in primary school children, as reported by parents and the children’s primary teachers, in a randomized clinical dismantling study, (b) to explore the reciprocal impact of EFST on parents and their children, and (c) to gain a better understanding of how the program works. 313 parents of 236 primary school children and 113 teachers were included in the research project. All of the findings combined suggest that EFST is efficacious in alleviating internalizing and externalizing symptoms in children, and improving parents own mental health, emotion regulation and self-efficacy. Outcomes were maintained after 12 months, supporting EFST as a preventive and easy-to-implement parental approach for early intervention. Furthermore, parents experienced changed perspectives in their role as parents, obtaining more of a calmness inside them and being less anxious. Also, this study provides new insight in support for the mediating role of children’s mental health symptoms on parental emotional change.