A Single Session Parenting Intervention for Children on a Outpatient Therapy Waitlist

Anxiety disorders affect as many as 30% of youth and are associated with academic and social impairment and onset of comorbid mood and substance use disorders. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is the treatment of choice for anxiety, achieving remission rates of 60% alone or 80% in combination with medication. However, up to 80% of youth with anxiety disorders do not access the services they need. CBT clinics nationwide have extremely long waits, on the order of 10-12 months. This leads to a vicious cycle, as children waiting for care experience worsening symptoms and decreased motivation, so that by the time they access care, their needs are more intensive and the treatment lasts longer and it takes longer for new children to be able to be assigned.

One proposed pathway to increase access to mental health services is through the delivery of single session interventions (SSIs). SSIs are defined as structured programs that involve one visit or mental health encounter. SSIs are brief, scalable, and there is extensive evidence demonstrating that they can decrease anxiety among children and adolescents recruited from the general community. Importantly, SSIs can be delivered in a self-guided online format. Thus, they are flexible in delivery and content and uniquely suited to be implemented in an outpatient mental health setting for patients on long outpatient therapy waitlists.

One such SSI is the online, self-guided, EMPOWER Program. This SSI takes 30 minutes and targets parent accommodation, a tendency to facilitate avoidance and enable anxious coping that has been shown to maintain and worsen child anxiety and OCD. This SSI has shown promise in reducing parent accommodation of children's anxiety in non-clinical community samples. However, it has not yet been tested among children seeking psychotherapy services who present with higher acuity. Thus, the goal of this project is to test the EMPOWER SSI delivered to parents of children on the waitlist for outpatient CBT. Parent participants will be randomized to either the SSI or to remain on the waitlist as usual for monitoring. The investigators predict that parents who receive the SSI, compared to the control group, will report (a) greater reductions in accommodation from baseline to 2-week follow-up. As a secondary hypothesis, the investigators will explore whether children of parents who received the SSI will show more rapid improvements in anxiety symptoms over the first 6 months of CBT.

Inclusion criteria

Parents will be eligible to participate if:

• Their child has anxiety and/or Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) (either subclinical or clinical), as determined by an initial screening
• Their child is between the age of 5 and 12 years-old
• Parents are English-speaking
• Parents are over the age of 18 years old

Exclusion criteria

Parents will be excluded if:

• Their child shows symptoms of suicidal or homicidal ideation, psychosis, or primary severe mood or behavior disorder (i.e., if treatment for another disorder other than anxiety is indicate prior to treatment for anxiety)
• Their child is already receiving CBT (i.e., transfer cases from other CBT providers in the community).