Abstract
Background
Parents’ personal psychotherapy experiences can shape their expectancies of mental health treatment for themselves and offspring. For instance, parents with negative psychotherapy experiences may view mental health treatment as less likely to be helpful—and seek treatment at lower rates—for themselves and their children. However, these associations are not absolute. One potential moderator may be parents’ beliefs about failure as debilitating versus enhancing.
Objective
We tested whether beliefs about failure moderated links between parents’ own past psychotherapy experiences and their expectancies for future psychotherapy, both for themselves and offspring.
Method
One-hundred and forty-three parents with a history of receiving psychotherapy reported on beliefs about failure, past psychotherapy experiences, and future psychotherapy expectancies and preferences, for themselves and their offspring. All measures were completed through mTurk, an online method of collecting survey data.
Results
Parents perceiving their own past psychotherapy as ineffective held significantly lower expectancies that psychotherapy would benefit their offspring and were more likely to decline hypothetical treatment for offspring. These relations were significantly stronger among parents holding “failure-is-debilitating” beliefs, versus those with “failure-is-enhancing” beliefs. Parents’ reporting negative past therapy experiences had lower expectancies for their own future therapy regardless of failure beliefs.
Conclusions
“Failure-is-enhancing” beliefs may strengthen parents’ confidence that psychotherapy can benefit their children, especially in parents with negative treatment experiences themselves.
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Notes
The decision to focus on psychotherapy-based treatments, rather than medication-based treatments alone, is twofold: (1) previous literature has not found any significant links between failure beliefs and medication-based treatment for themselves or offspring and preliminary evidence suggest that parent factors, such as beliefs, may not be relevant for attitudes towards medication (Schleider and Weisz 2018); and (2) examining parent treatment history in relation to medication remains an important and unexplored question, but would have required additional analyses leading to reduction of statistical power to detect effect and is beyond the scope of the current study.
For a comprehensive listing of measures included in the original study, please see (Schleider and Weisz 2018).
The PROCESS macro is capable of running linear and binary logistic regressions depending on the type of dependent variable. We ran two linear regressions (for the outcome variable expected psychotherapy effectiveness) and two logistic regressions (for the binary outcome variable treatment preference).
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This research was supported by the Harvard University Department of Psychology William H. Talley Fund.
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Patricia M. Garibaldi and Madelaine R. Abel: Joint first-authorship.
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Garibaldi, P.M., Abel, M.R., Snow, R.L. et al. Does Failure Help or Harm? Linking Parents’ Treatment Histories, Views of Failure, and Expectancies for Child Psychotherapy. Child Youth Care Forum 49, 151–169 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-019-09523-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-019-09523-7