Trial reportChild: care, health and development2025
The Indirect Effect of a Brief Couple Intervention on Child Mental Health Challenges via the Interparental Relationship.
Trial report in Child: care, health and development, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- The Indirect Effect of a Brief Couple Intervention on Child Mental Health Challenges via the Interparental Relationship.Child: care, health and development · 2025Trial
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundChild mental health challenges have long-term implications for social and emotional functioning. The quality of the interparental relationship is an important contributor to children's mental health challenges. Evidence supports the use of brief couple interventions to enhance couple functioning, though secondary benefits to child outcomes are unknown. The current study examines whether changes to the interparental relationship following participation in a brief couple intervention, in turn, lead to changes in child mental health challenges.
methodsParticipants come from a secondary dataset from a randomized controlled trial of Love Together, Parent Together, a brief couple intervention, and included 267 parents (140 couples) with at least one child under 6 years old. Parents reported on 10 indicators of the interparental relationship and their child's mental health challenges at baseline, 1 week post-intervention and 1- and 3-month follow-ups.
resultsBased on an exploratory factor analysis including all 10 indicators of the interparental relationship, a two-factor model emerged, which included interparental conflict and general relationship quality. Structural equation modelling was used to test indirect effects with interparental conflict and relationship quality, respectively, as mediators, and child mental health challenges at 1- and 3-month follow-ups, respectively, as outcomes. The intervention did not significantly predict couples' T2 conflict, nor did T2 conflict predict follow-up child mental health challenges. The intervention significantly improved the couples' T2 relationship quality, though there were no reliable effects found on child mental health challenges.
conclusionsIn sum, though findings are consistent with the idea that conflict and relationship quality are unique factors of the interparental relationship, there is no evidence for benefits of a brief couple intervention to child mental health challenges. Future studies should carefully consider measurement selection and assessment schedules to detect developmental cascades following couple interventions.
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