Involving Fathers in the Delivery of Psychological Services

Although fathers play a significant role in children’s lives, they are not routinely involved in psychological services for children’s problems. The purpose of this special section is to consider strategies that may be helpful in engaging fathers in psychological services to address their children’s problems. The articles examine barriers to father involvement and suggest decision-making strategies to weigh the costs and benefits of father involvement. Interventions are proposed to promote coparenting in separated and divorced families and the use of cognitive approaches to expand the masculine role. Programs for maltreating fathers are described, and initiatives to involve men in violence prevention are presented.     

Involving Fathers in Psychological Services for Children

This paper is a commentary of the special series on involving fathers in psychological services for children. The following themes are addressed: the effects of fathers on child development; benefits of father involvement in child psychology services; obstacles to father involvement; engaging fathers; specific interventions for fathers; and implications for service development, training, and research.     

Supportive Coparenting Relationships as a Haven of Psychological Safety at the Transition to Parenthood

Guided by research on psychological safety, the authors used longitudinal survey data from a sample of 182 dual-earner male–female couples to examine the role of supportive coparenting in mediating relations between adult attachment orientations and parenting stress/satisfaction and further considered whether parenting self-efficacy moderated relations between supportive coparenting and parenting stress/satisfaction. Path analyses using IBM SPSS AMOS 22 and bootstrapping techniques indicated that fathers’ (but not mothers’) perceptions of supportive coparenting at 3 months postpartum mediated the associations between their attachment anxiety in the third trimester of pregnancy and their parenting stress and satisfaction at 9 months postpartum. Additional tests of moderation revealed that mothers’ perceptions of greater supportive coparenting were associated with lower parenting stress only when their parenting self-efficacy was low, but fathers’ perceptions of greater supportive coparenting were associated with greater parenting satisfaction only when their parenting self-efficacy was high. Implications and limitations are discussed.     

Delivery of Psychological Skills Training to Youngsters

The aim of the present study was to explore sport psychologists’ experiences of working with children and adolescents to understand how they have adapted both content and delivery of psychological skills training when consulting with young athletes. Interviews with 12 experienced sport psychology consultants from the United Kingdom were inductively content analyzed. Four main higher order themes relating to content and delivery emerged: consultancy skills, relating to youngsters, delivery medium, and maintaining engagement. The findings imply that psychologists experience challenges unique to youth populations but also have developed content and delivery strategies to overcome these.     

Prereferral Intervention to Improve Special Services Delivery

Many special services providers as well as consumers of services have become disillusioned with current approaches to services delivery. As a result, there has been growing interest in the development of alternative methods and procedures for providing services. One area which has received much attention is that of prereferral intervention. Essentially, this term refers to an approach of systematically providing and documenting interventions within the regular classroom setting before a referral for special education evaluation and decision making is made. The major components of the approach are described in the article, prereferral involvement is contrasted with traditional methods of service delivery, and a case illustration demonstrating important aspects is included. Finally, advantages of the approach and several unresolved issues and potential barriers are discussed.     

Student to Student Support Teams for Special Services Delivery

Student to student support teams can be used to provide special services in schools. These teams, which have potential as a viable intervention approach for the 1990s, provide unique but beneficial challen~es for special services practitioners and administrators. In this aitde, issues pertinent to implementation of student to student support teams are discussed.     

The Delivery of Manpower and Supportive Services to Rural Areas

This study identifies problems encountered by state employment service agencies and other organizations in the delivery of equitable manpower and supportive services to rural and migrant workers and recommends solutions to these problems.     

Have Phobias,Will Travel: Addressing One Barrier to the Delivery of an Evidence-Based Treatment

Although a host of evidence-based treatments exist for youth with anxiety disorders, less than 30% of youth and their families receive these treatments. One of the main barriers to receiving these treatments is the lack of access to care, due largely to the absence of mental health professionals who have expertise in the delivery of these treatments in certain geographic locales. The current study examined whether a brief intensive treatment for specific phobias (SPs), Augmented One-Session Treatment (OST-A), would result in comparable treatment gains for families who traveled a considerable distance to receive this treatment when compared to families who resided in our local community. Participants included 76 youth with a clinically confirmed diagnosis of SP (38 local families and an age- and sex-matched sample of 38 nonlocal families). Although SP severity at pretreatment was significantly greater for the nonlocal youth than the local youth, both nonlocal and local youth showed commensurate improvement and maintenance of treatment gains over a 6-month period across several clinical outcome measures. Findings from this study show that OST-A is effective when families choose to travel for treatment, addressing at least one of the barriers to use of this evidence-based treatment.     

Coparenting Conflict and Academic Readiness in Children of Teen Mothers: Effortful Control as a Mediator

Children's exposure to coparenting conflict has important implications for their developmental functioning, yet limited work has focused on such processes in families with diverse structures or ethnically and culturally diverse backgrounds. This longitudinal study examined the processes by which Mexican‐origin adolescent mothers' coparenting conflict with their 3‐year‐old children's grandmothers and biological fathers (N = 133 families) were linked to children's academic and social skills at 5 years of age, and whether children's effortful control at 4 years of age mediated the link between coparenting conflict and indices of children's academic readiness. Findings revealed that adolescent mothers' coparenting conflict with their child's biological father was linked to indices of children's academic and social school readiness through children's effortful control among girls, but not boys, whereas conflict with grandmothers was directly linked to boys' and girls' social functioning 2 years later. Findings offer information about different mechanisms by which multiple coparenting units in families of adolescent mothers are related to their children's outcomes, and this work has important implications for practitioners working with families of adolescent mothers.     

儿童收养研究中的心理学问题

国外关于儿童收养的心理学研究主要集中在收养儿童的心理适应、认知发展及人格发展等方面, 研究呈现了不同收养年龄、不同收养前经历、不同收养背景下的儿童不同的发展态势, 并做了原因探析和干预机制的探索。但国外该领域的心理学研究仍存在样本区分不明确、对原因的探讨相对薄弱等问题。国内儿童收养的心理学研究应更关注未经历剥夺环境的大龄儿童, 从亲属与非亲属收养、保密型与开放型收养的利弊对比等方面有针对性的开展本土化研究。     

Overt and Covert Coparenting Processes in the Family

This article introduces a new self-report instrument designed to measure the frequency of parental behaviors thought to promote or undermine children's sense of family. Members of 103 married couples rated their behavior in both public (all family members present) and private (alone with child) contexts. Factor analyses of these data revealed four distinct factors indexing: behaviors in the service of promoting a sense of Family Integrity; largely covert parent-to-child communications undermining, or conveying Disparagement of, the coparental partner; overt interparental Conflict in the presence of the child; and coparental disciplinary activities (Reprimand). Significant husband-wife correlations were found on each of the four individual subscales. Construct-specific intercorrelations also obtained between like scales on the new measure and on the Family Environment Scale and Quality of Coparenting Scale. Cluster analyses of husbands' and wives' scores on the four Coparenting Scale factors suggested five “types” of coparenting families: Disconnected, Supportive, Average, Distressed-Conflicted, and Passionate. These clusters, along with the value of self-report instruments in assessing coparenting behaviors that may be largely clandestine in nature, are discussed.     

Coparenting and early conscience development in the family

In the current research, the authors examined children's observed compliance in a family clean-up paradigm and parents' reports of coparenting to predict young children's conscience (e.g., affective discomfort and moral regulation) in a sample of 58 families with two parents and at least two children. The authors found relations between parents' reports of children's conscience development and observer-rated compliance in a family clean-up session, and significant correlations between coparenting and conscience development. There were a greater number of significant results for younger, 2-year-old siblings than for older siblings, which may reflect the importance of the period between 2 and 3 years for the emergence of conscience. Multiple regressions revealed that younger siblings' age, observed compliance/noncompliance, and parents' reports of coparenting were all significant in predicting parents' reports of affective discomfort and moral regulation. Findings underscore the importance of continuing research on whole-family dynamics when studying young children's early conscience and moral regulation.     

中国社会心理服务体系的建设构想

社会心理服务体系更准确的名称应是公共心理服务体系,其主要内容包括心理健康服务、社会心态培育、共同体认同建构这三大模块,其主要功能分别为预防和治疗心理疾病、提升全民族的心理健康水平,培育自尊自信、理性平和、积极向上的社会心态,以及塑造中华民族的统一文化认同和人类命运共同体认同。今后应进一步明确社会心理服务的基本公共服务的定位,明确社会心理服务体系建设的责任主体,发展中国特色的健康心理学、社会心理学和文化心理学学科,培养社会心理服务亟需的科研与实务人才,创新社会心理服务的供给方式,联合政府、高校、社区和第三方部门等多元力量,建设能够符合中国国情的,专业化、多类型、多层次、可持续的社会心理服务体系。