Change in Parental Depressive Symptoms in Trauma-Focused Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: Results from a Randomized Controlled Trial

Objectives: Depressive symptoms are frequently described in parents whose children have been exposed to traumatic events. Hence, including nonoffending parents in trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy (TF-CBT) for children and adolescents may help both children and their parents to cope with the trauma. Up to now, three randomized controlled trials have investigated parental depressive symptoms after TF-CBT. Given the ambiguous results, further effectiveness trials are needed to investigate parental benefit from TF-CBT. The aim of this study is to determine whether TF-CBT is superior to waitlist (WL) regarding change in parental depressive symptoms.

Methods: Parents, N = 84, whose children (age 6-17 years) were randomly assigned to either 12 sessions of TF-CBT (n = 40) or to WL condition (n = 44) completed the Beck Depression Inventory-Second Edition (BDI-II) for pre-post comparison. The group difference was tested through repeated-measures analyses of variance (ANOVA). The change in parental depressive symptoms was additionally categorized using the reliable change index.

Results: Repeated-measures ANOVA indicated a significant time effect F(1, 82) = 2.55, p = 0.02, and no significant time-group interaction F(1, 82) = 1.09, p = 0.30, suggesting a similar reduction in parental depressive symptoms in both groups. Across both conditions, most of the parents remained unchanged (n = 62), some of them improved (n = 17), and a few deteriorated (n = 5). There was no significant difference between the conditions (χ²(2) = 1.74; p = 0.42).

Conclusion: Contrary to findings of several previous studies, our results suggest no superiority of TF-CBT in comparison with WL regarding change in depressive symptoms in parents. This might be due to different types of the child's trauma. Parental benefit from TF-CBT was found in samples of sexually abused, but not in children and adolescents exposed to diverse trauma types.