Emotion-focused skills training for parents – a narrative review

The research on Emotion-Focused Skills Training (EFST) for parents and their children is reviewed to highlight the latest developments in emotionally oriented parental interventions. EFST is a recent addition to the scope of interventions targeting children’s mental health difficulties, and was initially developed for treating children with eating disorders under the name Emotion-Focused Family Therapy (EFFT). The two developers then started to work separately, but both programs contain the same essential elements based on the same core principles as in Emotion-Focused Therapy for couples (EFT-C) and Emotion-Focused Therapy for individuals (EFT). An increased interest in this program underlines the need to summarize its effect on mental health of children and their parents. In this narrative review, the latest research on EFST is reviewed, emphasizing findings from a recent effectiveness trial, supplemented by other ongoing research on EFST and EFFT that have examined the effectiveness of emotion-focused parenting interventions on children’s and their parents’ mental health and functioning. Additionally, research on mediating processes that could account for program effects, and posited mechanisms of change in this form of treatment, is reviewed.