This article updates the previous version, which was published in 2001; in it, the authors present their search methods to identify new studies on parenting programs in support of teenage parents and improving outcomes for their children, study selection criteria, data collection and analysis, and a discussion of the authors’ main findings.
This review’s objective was to examine the effectiveness of parenting programs in improving psychosocial outcomes for teenage parents and developmental outcomes in their children. The authors searched to find new studies for this updated review in January 2008 and May 2010 in CENTRAL, MEDLINE, EMBASE, ASSIA, CINAHL, DARE, ERIC, PsycINFO, Sociological Abstracts and Social Science Citation Index. The National Research Register (NRR) was last searched in May 2005 and U.K. Clinical Research Network Portfolio Database in May 2010. Their selection criteria included randomized controlled trials assessing short‐term parenting interventions aimed specifically at teenage parents and a control group (no‐treatment, waiting list or treatment‐as‐usual). The authors assessed the risk of bias in each study and standardized the treatment effect for each outcome in each study by dividing the mean difference in post‐intervention scores between the intervention and control groups by the pooled standard deviation. The authors included eight studies with 513 participants, providing a total of 47 comparisons of outcome between intervention and control conditions. Nineteen comparisons were statistically significant, all favoring the intervention group. They conducted nine meta‐analyses using data from four studies in total, each meta‐analysis including data from two studies. Four meta‐analyses showed statistically significant findings favoring the intervention group for the following outcomes: parent responsiveness to the child post‐intervention; infant responsiveness to mother at follow‐up; and an overall measure of parent‐child interactions post‐intervention and at follow‐up. The results of the remaining five meta‐analyses were inconclusive. The findings provide some evidence to suggest that parenting programs may be effective in improving several aspects of parent‐child interaction both in the short‐ and long‐term, but further research is now needed. Publisher Abstract Provided