Parenting with Anxiety

Summary

Anxiety disorders are the most common childhood mental health difficulty. Moreover, anxiety runs in families: children of anxious parents are around twice as likely to have anxiety problems as children of non-anxious parents.

We have already developed and evaluated a successful face-to-face intervention to support anxious parents in raising confident children, and reduce the risk of their children developing anxiety symptoms of their own. These workshops run in NHS Primary Care services in the South-East of England, which means only a small number of parents have access to them. Moreover, many interested parents have found it difficult to attend because of childcare and work commitments.

In order to reach the many thousands of parents who could benefit, we have developed an online version of the intervention.
This study will test the effectiveness of this online intervention and give us the information that we need to improve it and tailor it to different parents. . We will do this by running a randomised controlled trial where parents with substantial self-reported levels of anxiety will be randomised to either an intervention or control group (no intervention).

The intervention is an 8 module online course divided into learning modules with accompanying home practise tasks.