Effective components of parenting programs for children’s conduct problems

Parenting programs for children’s conduct problems are among the more ‘mature’ family-based interventions – more than 150 randomized trials and dozens of meta-analyses confirm their ability to reduce observed and parent-reported conduct problems. However, few programs are actually taken to scale, especially in times of health-care budget cuts and lower resource settings because many programs are complex and costly to implement. Recent developments to identify the effective components of parenting programs hold promise to fill the gap between existing complex evidence-based programs and the need for effective low-cost and easy-to-implement programs. This chapter provides an overview of these developments and their main findings.