Social Science Seminar - The Global Evidence on Parenting Interventions: Can They Help Improve Children’s Mental Health and Behaviour Problems, and Reduce Conflict and Violence in the Family?
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Parenting interventions are increasingly proposed as a solution for addressing children’s mental health and antisocial behaviour problems, for reducing violence against children in the home, and enhancing children’s development. But how strong is the evidence for parenting interventions, and how well do they transport to different cultures and contexts across the world? How much evidence is there from East and Southeast Asia? How helpful are these interventions for families most at risk, such as those living in poverty, and for those suffering violence and conflict in or outside the family? Are the effects of these interventions likely to be equitable across different social groups? In what service contexts do they work, and how can they be taken to scale within real-world service systems? The talk will draw on Professor Gardner’s recent work with the World Health Organization (WHO), conducting systematic reviews and meta-analyses for the first WHO Guidelines on Parenting Interventions; on her work pooling data across multiple randomized trials (using Individual Participant Data Meta-analysis), and her randomised trials of parenting interventions in UK, USA, Eastern Europe and Asia.
Frances Gardner is Professor of Child and Family Psychology, Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford, and Fellow of Wolfson College. She was founder director of Oxford’s graduate programme in Evidence-Based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation, and is Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. In the 2025 King’s Birthday honours, she was appointed as a Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George (CMG), in recognition of her services to reducing violence against children. In 2025 she was awarded the Association for Child & Adolescent Mental Health’s President Medal for Lifetime Contribution to Child and Adolescent Mental Health.
Her research focuses on the development, testing and scale-up of early parenting interventions for improving parent-child interaction, and reducing maltreatment and child problem behaviour, in the UK, USA and globally. She investigates questions about transportability of parenting interventions across contexts, mechanisms of change, and for whom they are most effective. She has over 250 scientific publications, and her research is highly cited (h-index 81, google scholar).
Her work has considerable impact on policy and practice, advising WHO, PAHO, UNICEF and government departments across sectors in the UK, Europe and Asia. She led the systematic reviews that underpinned the 2023 WHO Guidelines on Parenting Interventions, served on the WHO Guideline expert panel, and is a co-founder of the WHO-supported ‘Parenting for Lifelong Health’ programs. From 2012 - 2024 she served on the board of the longest standing ‘What Works’ clearinghouse in the world, Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development, at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Host: Prof Stuart Gietel-Basten, Professor, Division of Social Science, HKUST