Examining Therapeutic Change Mechanisms in an Affect Regulation, Father-Focused Intervention for Reducing Family Violence and Associated Symptoms in Children

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ABSTRACT Children’s exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV), often perpetrated by fathers, has been described as a gateway to other adversity, with more than a 50% co-occurrence of direct forms of child maltreatment (CM). IPV exposure can wreak havoc on children, with risk for psychosocial impairments, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), that can emerge early and cascade across development. Lacking are interventions that adequately address the complex nature of IPV in families, including fatherhood and coparenting. This gap reflects a bias towards excluding offending fathers from child-focused work and an overreliance on batterer intervention programs (BIPs), which have shown negligible effects in meta-analyses and fail to address the roots of offending behaviors in fathers. Consequently, IPV exposed children remain at risk and fathers’ personal and interpersonal functioning, including the father-child relationship, does not improve. In effect, there is an urgent need for effective interventions for fathers and their families. Fathers for Change (F4C) is a novel fatherhood-focused intervention with a dual focus on IPV and CM that focuses on identifying, understanding, and managing emotions to reduce aggression and improve partner and parent-child interactions. F4C has a growing evidence-base demonstrating significant reductions in family violence, improved father-child interactions, and in one open trial, improved child mental health. Proposed therapeutic mechanisms of F4C include reflective functioning (RF), the capacity for parents to understand their own and children’s actions as a function of underlying states and motivations, and emotion regulation (ER), the capacity to exert control over emotional states and reactions to threat. Poor RF and ER have been associated with increased family violence and stress-related psychopathology, suggesting key focal points for intervention. To date, there have been no empirical examinations of ER and RF as therapeutic change mechanisms for reducing family violence and improving father-child interactions and child mental health. Proposed is a dual-site, multi-modal examination of ER and RF in fathers (of children 4-7 y.o.) randomized to F4C (N=180) or the Duluth Model (N=180), a BIP serving as active control. In-session observational coding will assess adaptive and maladaptive ER and RF across treatment. Weekly self-ratings will assess at-home ER and RF. Aims will (1) assess efficacy of F4C compared to a standard BIP in reducing family violence and child mental health impairment, (2) identify and compare trajectories of therapeutic change targets across interventions, and (3) examine the mediating role of father’s ER and RF on child-related outcomes. This proposal will grow the evidence-base for F4C and advance our understanding of therapeutic mechanisms through which F4C exerts its effects.