Innovations in Practice: Brief behavioral parent training for children with impairing ADHD characteristics – a pilot study

Background: Behavioral parent training (BPT) is a well-established intervention for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but most programs are long, which may limit their accessibility. This could be improved by making programs shorter. Here, we studied (1) the feasibility of a new brief BPT program and its procedures, and (2) pre–post changes in daily rated problem behaviors (primary outcome), children's disruptive behaviors, ADHD/ODD characteristics, impairment, and parents' sense of parenting competence (secondary outcomes).

Methods: We conducted a nonrandomized pilot study including parents of 28 children (4–12 years) with impaired ADHD characteristics. We examined treatment dropout, parent and therapist satisfaction, recruitment rates, study drop-out, measurement response and completion rates, acceptability of measurements according to parents, and treatment fidelity. Pre–post changes in the treatment group were compared to those in a historical control group using mixed model analysis, except for those outcomes that were not assessed in the control group. Within-group differences were analyzed for all outcomes.

Results: Feasibility of the program and study procedures were good. Treatment dropout was 14.2%, parents and therapists were satisfied with the new program. We recruited 1.5 participants per month, study dropout was 10.7%, response/completion rates ranged from 82% to 100%, measurements were acceptable for parents, and treatment fidelity was 96%. We found substantial within-group changes (d's =.68–.77) and medium-sized between-group changes (d's =.46–.48) on daily rated problem behaviors. We observed no changes on most of the secondary outcomes, except for disruptive behaviors and impairment.

Conclusion: Our newly developed brief BPT program was feasible and we observed improvements in children's daily-rated problem behaviors. These results suggest that brief BPT might be beneficial for clinical practice if the findings are confirmed in large-scale randomized controlled trials.