Supporting Parents of Anxious Children

Project Description

This project focuses on the mechanisms to support parents of children with significant anxiety. This can be a fully qualitative project or a mixed methods to consider the development or evaluation of interventions designed for supporting parents in group settings. This is aimed at understanding the experiences of parents and carers of children with significant anxiety, particularly those children who find it very difficult to engage with therapeutic support because of that anxiety, or because of a neurodevelopmental condition, or simply due to resistance. In CAMHS, children are supported with anxiety, but some of those children are not able to engage in standard treatments which means that they are discharged without meaningful support and their mental health deteriorates. Consequently, this puts additional strain on parents and families. The focus of the project is thinking through ways to support these families and specifically parents, while finding ways to reduce service burden.

The focus then of the project is on children with significant anxiety, their parents and families, and finding mechanisms of support to reduce a referral-discharge cycle. Understanding parental perspectives and child perspectives could be a valuable feature of this project. Parent and carer involvement is fundamental to any intervention to support these children and will be central to the research process, supporting meaningful co-production. Furthermore, the project should consider how any intervention might empower families, supports schools and community services, and address the wider systemic impact of childhood anxiety on families across the life course.