Abstract
Parenting interventions offer an evidence-based method for the prevention and early intervention of child mental health problems, but to-date their population-level effectiveness has been limited by poor reach and engagement, particularly for fathers, working mothers, and disadvantaged families. Tailoring intervention content to parents' context offers the potential to enhance parent engagement and learning by increasing relevance of content to parents' daily experiences. However, this approach requires a detailed understanding of the common parenting situations and issues that parents face day-to-day, which is currently lacking. We sought to identify the most common parenting situations discussed by parents on parenting-specific forums of the free online discussion forum, Reddit. We aimed to understand perspectives from both mothers and fathers, and thus retrieved publicly available data from r/Daddit and r/Mommit. We used latent Dirichlet allocation to identify the 10 most common topics discussed in the Reddit posts, and completed a manual text analysis to summarize the parenting situations (defined as involving a parent and their child aged 0-18 years, and describing a potential/actual issue). We retrieved 340 (r/Daddit) and 578 (r/Mommit) original posts. A model with 31 latent Dirichlet allocation topics was best fitting, and 24 topics included posts that met our inclusion criteria for manual review. We identified 45 unique but broadly defined parenting situations. The majority of parenting situations were focused on basic childcare situations relating to eating, sleeping, routines, sickness, and toilet training; or related to how to respond to child negative emotions or difficult behavior. Most situations were discussed in relation to infant or toddler aged children, and there was high consistency in the themes raised in r/Daddit and r/Mommit. Our results offer potential to tailor parenting interventions in a meaningful way, creating opportunities to develop content and resources that are directly relevant to parents' lived experiences.
Highlights
A key limitation of community-based parenting interventions is that they are usually offered as one-size-fits-all packages, which stands in contrast to evidence that parents differ in the techniques that are most applicable to them [1,2,3,4], and require tailored approaches [5]
On inspection of the top 10 original posts related to each topic, 24 of the 31 latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topics contained posts that met the inclusion criteria in terms of being consistent with our pre-specified definition of a parenting situation, and meaningfully reflecting the topic words
There is little in the way of published evidence documenting the specific parenting examples used in parenting interventions, it is the experience of the authors that these examples tend to relate to situations involving the second theme, i.e., related to managing child negative emotions and difficult behavior
Summary
A key limitation of community-based parenting interventions is that they are usually offered as one-size-fits-all packages, which stands in contrast to evidence that parents differ in the techniques that are most applicable to them [1,2,3,4], and require tailored approaches [5]. Tailoring may take into account parents’ needs or their day-to-day parenting context. To enable a more systematic way of tailoring interventions to specific parenting situations, and facilitate parents to immediately implement intervention concepts in their daily lives, the field requires an accurate map of the wide range of day-to-day parenting situations that parents may need support with. The current study aims to meet this need, by investigating the most common issues that draw parents online to discuss their experiences of parenting with other parents
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
