Dads Tuning In to Kids: Preliminary Evaluation of a Fathers' Parenting Program

• Author: Christiane Kehoe,Sophie S. Havighurst,Katherine R. Wilson,Ann E. Harley
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12216
• Published date: 01 October 2016
• Date: 01 October 2016

K R. W, S S. H, C K,  A E. H

University of Melbourne

Dads Tuning In to Kids: Preliminary Evaluation

of a Fathers’ Parenting Program

We investigated outcomes of Dads Tuning In

to Kids, a new seven-session group program

targeting paternal emotion-socialization prac-

tices, which are related to children’s social and

emotional functioning. In a randomized control

trial with 162 fathers of children between 3

and 6 years of age, intervention fathers (n=87)

and waitlist control fathers (n=75) completed

questionnaires at baseline (pre-program) and

10 weeks later (post-program). Compared to

control fathers, intervention fathers statisti-

cally increased in empathy, encouragement

of emotion expression, and parenting efcacy,

and decreased in emotion-dismissing beliefs,

dismissive reactions to children’s negative emo-

tions, and hostile parenting responses. Theyalso

reported improved child behavior. These nd-

ings offer preliminary support for this program

for fathers.

It is well established that parenting programs

can assist in improving outcomes for child-

ren (Kaminski, Valle, Filene, & Boyle, 2008;

Sanders, Kirby, Tellegen, & Day, 2014). How-

ever, this eld of research has focused pre-

dominantly on mothers, despite the important

role of fathers in child development (e.g.,

Mindful: Centre for Training and Research in Develop-

mental Health, University of Melbourne, Building C, 50

Flemington Street, Flemington, Melbourne 3031, Australia

(wilk@unimelb.edu.au).

Key Words: Emotion socialization, fathers and fatherhood,

parenting program,preschool children, prevention.

Allen & Daly, 2007; Lamb & Lewis, 2010;

McWayne, Downer, Campos, & Harris, 2013).

Evaluation studies of skills-based parenting

programs for fathers remain sparse, and so it is

not clear whether parenting programs with

demonstrated efcacy in improving mothers’

parenting are, or would be, similarly ben-

ecial for fathers. The paucity of paternal

research includes parenting programs focusing

on emotion socialization.

Parents’ emotion-socialization practices in-

uence how children learn to understand and

manage emotions, an important developmental

task of early childhood (Halberstadt, Denham,

& Dunsmore, 2001), and the targeting of mater-

nal emotion socialization in parenting programs

has been effective in improving child outcomes

(Havighurst, Wilson, Harley, Prior, & Kehoe,

2010). In this article, we extend this area of

research to fathers. We describe an adapted ver-

sion of a group parenting program, Tuning In

to Kids (TIK; see Havighurst & Harley, 2007),

previously shown to be effective for improv-

ing emotion socialization in samples of mostly

mothers (Havighurst et al., 2010; Wilson, Hav-

ighurst, & Harley, 2012). We briey review evi-

dence for the importance of fathers and why

they should be included in programs offered

to parents, then outline how TIK was modi-

ed specically for fathers. Finally, we report

the ndings from the preliminary phase of a

randomized control trial evaluating the efcacy

of the adapted program, Dads Tuning In to

Kids (DadsTIK), in a community sample of

fathers.

Family Relations 65 (October 2016): 535–549 535

DOI:10.1111/fare.12216