{"id":179479,"date":"2021-12-09T07:15:59","date_gmt":"2021-12-09T12:15:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=179479"},"modified":"2021-12-08T11:29:14","modified_gmt":"2021-12-08T16:29:14","slug":"uconn-study-improved-parenting-reduced-youth-suicide-risk-by-combating-negative-self-views-in-bereaved-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2021\/12\/uconn-study-improved-parenting-reduced-youth-suicide-risk-by-combating-negative-self-views-in-bereaved-children\/","title":{"rendered":"UConn Study: Improved Parenting Reduced Youth Suicide Risk by Combating Negative Self-Views in Bereaved Children"},"content":{"rendered":"

Children who have experienced the death of a parent are at an increased risk for mental health disorders, depression, and suicide, but a new study from a researcher with UConn\u2019s Department of Human Development & Family Sciences<\/a> is shining light on how supporting surviving parents can help reduce suicide risk in vulnerable youth.<\/p>\n

\u201cResearchers have studied suicide for many decades,\u201d says Na Zhang, an assistant professor and lead author of the new study. \u201cHowever, we still don’t have a good way to predict suicide, suicidal ideation, or suicidal behavior. We know some of the factors that are related; however, overall the predictability is not as high as we want it to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zhang\u2019s study, published in the journal Development and Psychopathology<\/em><\/a>, examined the unanticipated reduction in suicide risk among parentally bereaved youth when their surviving parent or caregiver participated in the Family Bereavement Program, or FBP \u2013 an evidence-based intervention originally developed by the REACH Institute<\/a> at Arizona State University and now available to community agencies and providers in a second version, known as Resilient Parenting for Bereaved Families<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis intervention itself is not a suicide prevention program,\u201d Zhang explains. \u201cIt focuses on helping bereaved parents do the hard work of providing effective parenting while they themselves are grieving.\u201d<\/p>\n

The original FBP included 12 group-based sessions comprised of separate groups for caregivers and children as well as two family sessions, all focused on supporting the parenting skills and needs of the surviving parents and caregivers of children coping with the loss of a parent.<\/p>\n

The program developers found that, at six and 15-year follow-ups, youth suicide risk for participating families was significantly reduced, and Zhang wanted to understand why.<\/p>\n

\u201cImagine you have a pill, a medicine, and you want to treat your cold or your physical disease or illness,\u201d she says. \u201cYou know this pill works to treat the disease, but you want to know how these pills work. You want to know what kind of effect, and what chain of effects, is in the body, and what kind of biological or chemical changes happen that can lead to the outcome that you see as desirable.\u201d<\/p>\n

She continues, \u201cThe goal of the intervention was to prevent mental health disorders, including internalizing problems such as depression and anxiety, but also externalizing problems like aggression and conduct problems. There was no specific intervention strategy about suicide, or reducing suicide risk. We call this an upstream suicide prevention \u2013 by focusing on parenting and children\u2019s coping upstream, early in their development, then later in their life the suicide risk is reduced. I was really interested in how this upstream preventive intervention could have such a long-term effect to reduce suicide risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

Through a secondary data analysis, Zhang reexamined information from the baseline and posttest examinations as well as 11-month, six-year, and 15-year follow-ups for 156 of the families that participated in the program. The sample included families where a parent had died between four and 30 months prior, the child was between eight and 16 years old, and the family was not currently receiving other mental health services.<\/p>\n

Zhang tested six different factors \u2013 called mediators \u2013 that researchers hypothesized could be connected to the reduced suicide risk for youth with caregivers involved in the program.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe mediators are what you can call the \u2018active ingredients\u2019 of this intervention,\u201d she explains.<\/p>\n

She found that two of the mediators \u2013 reduced aversive self-views and increased child positive connectedness to their caregivers\u00a0 \u2013 were associated with upstream parenting and downstream reduced suicide risk. Reduced aversive self-views \u2013 which refer to lower levels of self-esteem, control over things that happen in their world and sense of personal identity \u2013 in particular stood out in the data as an important effect of the program.<\/p>\n

The effects of aversive self-views on suicide risk was first hypothesized 30 years by a theoretical paper<\/a> which proposed that suicide came from people\u2019s need to escape from these kinds of negative feelings about themselves. This is the first study to find that reducing aversive self-views through a program six years earlier is part of a pathway to the effects of the program to actually reduce suicide risk.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the surviving parents who were randomized into the program, we know that their parenting improved, and that improved parenting led to reductions in the youth reporting aversive self-views or negative self-views,\u201d says Zhang. \u201cThey reported less negative views of themselves and their relationship to their world, and that was related to reductions in suicide risk. And what’s more interesting is that, when we put these two active ingredients together \u2013 the self-views and the caregiver connectedness \u2013 the aversive self-views remained statistically significant. So that really shows that this concept of self-views is a very important intervention target that we want to consider when we think about whether this intervention can reduce suicide risk over the long term.\u201d<\/p>\n

This study, she says, is the first to show that a causally induced change in parenting led to a chain of positive effects in the parentally bereaved youth, including reduced suicide risk.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe paper also is the first to show that not only is parenting leads to a positive chain of events leading to the reduction in suicide risk,\u201d Zhang says, \u201cbut also how \u2013 how can positive, high-quality parenting translates to reductions in youth suicide risk. Here, we show that these aversive self-views are such an important pathway to explain how parenting leads to reductions in suicide risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zhang says that further study is needed to have more of a systematic way to access suicide risk, and also to differentiate suicidal ideations from suicidal behaviors or suicidal attempts, which she was not able to assess due to limitations in the data she analyzed.<\/p>\n

Her study also looked at parenting globally \u2013 not delving into the individual aspects of parenting, like discipline, protection, sensitivity, and guided learning \u2013 which could explain why other mediators, like complicated grief, that she had hypothesized might also be \u201cactive ingredients\u201d that explained the effects of the program to reduce suicide risk in parentally bereaved youth.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe take home message here is that it’s important for researchers to identify the possible risk factors or protective factors for youth suicide risk, suicidal ideation, or suicidal behaviors, so that they can design more targeted interventions to address those factors in their program to reduce that risk,\u201d Zhang says. \u201cAnd here what we’re finding is that these self-views seem to be really relevant.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zhang\u2019s coauthors on the study included Irwin Sandler, Jenn-Yun Tein, and Sharlene Wolchik from the Arizona State University Department of Psychology\u2019s REACH Institute.<\/p>\n

Support for this research was provided by <\/em>National Institute of Mental Health<\/em><\/a> Grant R01 MH4915 and the New York Life Foundation. Zhang\u2019s work was also supported by a National Research Service Award in Primary Prevention by the <\/em>National Institute on Drug Abuse<\/em><\/a> T32DA039772<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>A portion of this work was presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Prevention Research in 2020, which was held virtually.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘We call this an upstream suicide prevention \u2013 by focusing on parenting and children\u2019s coping upstream, early in their development, then later in their life the suicide risk is reduced’ <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":134,"featured_media":179888,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2231,2076,2235],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2168],"class_list":["post-179479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-health-well-being","category-research","category-today-homepage"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-05 15:42:08","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/134"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179479"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":179890,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179479\/revisions\/179890"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/179888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179479"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=179479"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=179479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}