A Randomized Clinical Trial of the Building on Family Strengths Program: An Education Program for Parents of Children with Chronic Health Conditions

To test the 6-month efficacy of an inclusive non-diagnosis-specific, 7-session parent education curriculum on five pre-specified outcomes. A randomized clinical trial with 100 parents having children 2–11 years with a variety of chronic conditions was conducted. The 7-session curriculum, Building on Family Strengths (BFS), was created by an interdisciplinary pediatric team as a derivative of a successful adult chronic disease self-Management program distributed by Stanford University Patient and Education Research Center. Despite no differences at baseline, intervention participants had higher scores on self-efficacy to manage the child’s condition (p = 0.049), coping with childhood chronic illness (p < 0.001), parent–child shared management of the condition (p = 0.097), family quality of life (p = 0.010), and, lower scores on a measure of depressive symptoms (p = 0.046) at the 6-month end-point. Average effect-sizes were modest across outcomes (7–11 % improvement) with intervention participants having baseline scores in the least favorable quartile improving the most (12–41 %). This research provides evidence that the BFS curriculum can yield significant improvements across five important outcomes for parents of children with various chronic conditions. Parent education programs should be offered especially to parents of children with chronic health conditions, regardless of the type of condition, who lack adequate support. These programs can help parents cope with and manage their children’s chronic conditions more effectively.