(PS12-36) Parental Cognitions and Mental Health Treatment Attitudes

Parents play a crucial role as primary decision makers for children’s mental health treatment. To optimize treatment engagement and the child’s health outcomes, it is essential to understand which parental beliefs and factors contribute to their treatment attitudes. Previous research found relationships between fixed emotion mind-sets, failure-is-debilitating beliefs, parental attributions, severity of child symptomology, perceived parenting skills, readiness for change and treatment expectancies (Andrade et al., 2015;Chase & Gimpel, 2017; Schleider & Weisz, 2018). However, no research has yet tested these multiple factors associated with treatment motivation together for a clinical sample of families considering both internalizing and externalizing problems. Our study examines how parents’ cognitions influence their treatment attitudes about medication, psychotherapy, and parent training. We asked parents (N=94) of children aged 3-12 who received mental health services at a tertiary children’s hospital to complete online measures of parenting beliefs and treatment attitudes. Our results show significant correlations between parental mindset and failure beliefs (ave r = .27, p < .05), which in turn are significantly correlated with parental attributions (ave r = .34, p < .001). Parent readiness for change was significantly correlated with severity of child symptomology (r = .30, p = .002) and acceptability of parent management training (r = .40, p < .001), whereas acceptability of medication treatment was correlated with failure-is-debilitating beliefs (r = .26, p = .006). In the second part of the study, we tested whether it was possible to change parental mindsets and treatment attitudes by randomly assigning parents to read an article about growth mindset (Experimental n= 50) compared to those who read an article about the science of emotions (Control n = 44). Two-way mixed ANOVAs showed significant interactions between time (pre- vs post- article) and condition (experimental vs control) on mindset beliefs about emotion (F(2,92) = 18.73, p < .001, η2= .17) and failure beliefs (F(1,92) = 13.08, p < .001, η2 = .12). Specifically, fixed mindset and failure beliefs for the experimental group decreased significantly post-article than belief scores for the control group (Mdiff = 0.385, p < .001 , d = .689; Mdiff = 0.597, p < 0.05, respectively). However, there were no significant post-article effects for treatment attitudes, parent readiness for change and parental attributions. In conclusion, parents’ treatment attitudes about medication and parent training interventions are related to their failure beliefs and readiness for change, respectively, which in turn are related to their attributions and severity of child problems, respectively. We can change parental mindset and failure beliefs through a brief and passive psychoeducation article, but other options may be needed to more significantly impact parents’ treatment motivations.