Development Insights and User Experience of a Preventive Digital Parenting Intervention for Adolescent Mental Health

Background: Despite being hailed as a promising avenue for preventing increasingly prevalent adolescent mental health problems, digital parenting interventions to strengthen adolescent mental well-being remain scarce. How such interventions are developed and experienced by end-users provides key insights for their later implementation and contextualizes information on their effectiveness, yet little systemic evidence is available.Objective: To inform optimal development and aid careful evaluation of digital parenting interventions, this preregistered multimethod study served three aims. First, to identify theoretical, functional, and user-derived lessons for digital parenting interventions for adolescent mental well-being, distilled from the challenges of developing a novel digital parenting intervention. Second, to examine user experience in terms of feasibility, adoption, acceptability, and appropriateness as early markers of implementation success. Third, to understand whether user experience is linked to characteristics of the intervention (i.e., universal versus personalized delivery), parents (e.g., openness to advice), or adolescents (e.g., depressive symptoms).Methods: Development of the intervention was based on Self-Determination Theory and followed an iterative process, including focus groups with parents and adolescents, a pilot study among n = 12 families and subsequent exit-interviews, and a brainstorm session with experts (n = 6). The intervention was evaluated among parents (N = 199, Mage = 47.6, SDage = 4.7), resulting in administrative and daily diary data of user experience (feasibility, adoption, acceptability, and appropriateness). Baseline data were used to test whether intervention, parent, and adolescent characteristics related to user experience.Results: Findings suggest that adolescent perspectives align with the tenets of self-determination theory as a framework that can be translated to concrete advice for parents, that the frequency and delivery of advice should fit family routines, and parental agency and choice were important user needs. Feasibility, adoption, acceptability, and appropriateness were sufficient according to our preregistered criteria, but there was substantial heterogeneity between parents and within parents (across days). User experience did not differ between a personalized and universal version of the intervention. Parents who were generally more open to advice, and parents of boys, younger adolescents, and less depressed adolescents evaluated the intervention more favorably. Conclusions: Findings suggest that the fit between our intervention and parents differed substantially across parents, and from tip tot tip, highlighting the need for further refinement of our digital parenting interventions before implementation, and the consideration of user experience throughout development.