The Family School

Summary

Introduction

The Family School is aimed at children aged 3 to 6 years and their parents. It consists of a group of parents and a group of children. The aim of the programme is to provide tools and support for families struggling with a child’s challenging behaviour. Challenging behaviour can manifest as defiance, impulsivity, aggression or hyperactivity.

Objective and research question

This systematic literature review assesses the effectiveness of the Family School intervention on the basis of research literature. The review answers the following question: is the Family School effective in addressing behavioural problems in children under school age, aged 3 to 6 years, and contributing to positive parenting?

Data and methods

This study used the Population, Concept and Context (PCC) strategy to search for literature, which is a typical strategy in exploratory literature reviews. The search targeted the following question: what research has been done on the Family School?  The following keywords were used: P = parents and young children, C = Family School. Context was omitted to avoid an excessive restriction of the results of the search. The primary area of interest in the search was effectiveness studies carried out on the intervention, although studies carried out using different frameworks were also included. A systematic search was carried out for the following six databases: MEDLINE, APA PsycInfo, CINAHL, ERIC, Web of Science and Scopus. In addition, a search for Finnish publications was performed on the Finna.fi service, and the search was supplemented by a manual search.

Results

The literature search found a Finnish monograph dissertation that examines the results and effectiveness of the Family School programme. The intervention has also been the subject of a licentiate thesis, which was highlighted in the review. The Family School is well-described, and its mechanisms of action are based on the principles of cognitive-therapeutic and behavioural-therapeutic interventions and social learning theory. According to the dissertation, progress was observed in the parenting skills of the parents who participated in the Family School and in the behaviour of the participating children, but no differences compared to the control group were found. The results were maintained during a one-year follow-up. The quality of the study was good, although the group sizes were small. The implementation support provided by the intervention is satisfactory. There is room for improvement particularly in the provision of tools for monitoring, maintenance and repeatability for those who implement the intervention.

Methodology evaluation

The Family School is a well-described and promising intervention that has a theoretical foundation and preliminary research on its effectiveness. The evaluation score for the intervention is 3/5.