Protocol for the Implementation and Evaluation of a Mindfulness-Based Intervention for Caregivers of Children with Mental Disorders in a Clinical Setting.

Ana Pizarro-Carmona,Sofía Baena,Lucía Jiménez,Patricia Jiménez

doi:10.3390/ijerph182010777

Abstract

Being a parent is complicated in typical circumstances, with a great psychological impact as well as feelings and experiences of great intensity. This impact is greater in families in vulnerable situations, such as those with children with mental health problems, receiving treatment in a clinical setting. Due to these challenges, parenting in these circumstances is often accompanied by experiences of stress. An approach that has shown evidence of effectiveness in mitigating the negative impact of stress is mindfulness-based interventions, including the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction intervention program. The Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction intervention program is designed as a psychoeducational, instructional, multimodal, and structured program whose main objective is to provide strategies for the management, coping, and awareness of stress in order to reduce it. In this paper, a protocol for the implementation and evaluation of the original Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction intervention program with the added positive parenting component is presented, in order to systematize the incorporation of a parenting component in the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction intervention program, analyze its effectiveness for parents whose children have mental health problems (in terms of stress, mindfulness, emotional intelligence, general health, and parental role), explore the mechanisms of change operating in this intervention as perceived by the participants, and examine the application of acquired strategies to daily life.

Highlights

Positive parenting contents will be incorporated throughout the intervention, two specific positive parenting sessions will be added, and the timing of the sessions and home practices will be modified
The adaptation of the timing of the sessions and home practices take into consideration the already busy schedules of parents of children and adolescents with mental health problems [3,4]
We expect to satisfy the demands of parents for both self-nourishing/self-care time and an improvement of parental competencies by incorporating positive parenting contents in a personal development psychoeducational intervention [3,4]

Summary

Introduction

Everyday childcare involves challenges related to the provision of care to promote the optimal development of children, always taking into account the circumstances in which each family is immersed. Due to these challenges, parenting is often accompanied by experiences of stress which, in turn, has an effect on different facets of their daily life [1,2]. Sometimes these stressful experiences can be balanced by the benefits and satisfactions of parenting, these negative emotions can persist and even intensify when there is an overflow of demands that cannot be met. Some of the additional demands that these parents face include the establishment of relationships and coordination with multiple professionals and services, lack of information about the resources available, the navigation of the resource and intervention system and the diagnosis, grief over the diagnosis, and feelings of inadequacy and incompetence in their

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion