Australian Rotary Health

Dr Sophie Havighurst (PhD, Dip Clin Psych) is a Child Clinical Psychologist who has clinical, research, and teaching experience in the field of early intervention with children at risk for antisocial development. She is a Senior Lecturer at Mindful: Centre for Training and Research in Developmental Health at the University of Melbourne, where she leads the Tuning in to Kids research program and teaches and provides supervision to child and adolescent mental health practitioners. Dr Havighurst works as a clinician at the Melbourne Children’s Court Clinic, and provides therapy to children and families in private practice.

Dr Havighurst undertook her PhD research with Professor Margot Prior and Associate Professor Ann Sanson between 1999-2003, examining emotion regulation and behaviour problems in pre-school children. During this period, in collaboration with Ann Harley, Dr Lyn Littlefield, Dr Katherine Wilson, and Professor Margot Prior, she wrote and project managed a pilot study of an emotion-focused parenting program that targeted pre-school children’s emotional competence. This pilot research has now been developed into a randomised controlled trial funded by Australian Rotary Heath and involving collaboration with the Centre for Community Child Health at the Royal Children’s Hospital and MacKillop Family Services.

Dr Havighurst is the Principal Investigator on this research trial. Additional research projects include: an evaluation of the Tuning in to Kids program for primary school aged children with behaviour problems – through the Victorian State Government funded CAMHS and Schools Early Action project (CASEA) in partnership with the Austin and Bendigo CAMHS; and an evaluation of a similar program, Tuning in to Teens, for parents of Grade 6 children.

SUMMARY OF PROJECT:

Building pre-schoolers’ emotional intelligence

Dr Sophie Havighurst from the University of Melbourne has received an ARHRF grant to complete the evaluation of a program that changes the way parents respond to their preschool children’s emotions. It is expected that improvements in parental responses to emotions will improve the children’s ability to understand, regulate and appropriately express emotions (i.e. their emotional intelligence), and this will in turn, reduce behavioural problems. Eighty-five children from 16 preschools are currently involved in the study.

PROGRESS REPORT:

Dr. Sophie Havighurst, Co-Investigators: Prof. Margot Prior, A/Prof. Ann Sanson & Daryl Efron

“Tuning into Kids”: Building preschoolers’ emotional competence: Evaluating an early intervention for children with behaviour problems.

Emotional competence (emotional intelligence) is central to healthy child development and is significantly affected by the role that parents play in helping children to understand, regulate and appropriately express their emotions. Pre-school children who have disruptive behaviour problems are at risk for later anti-social behaviour and often fail to develop emotional competence skills. To date interventions have rarely attempted to improve emotional competence as a way of reducing behaviour problems.

Dr Havighurst’s research evaluates a parent intervention strategy that targets pre-school children's emotional competence. It investigates whether a parenting program teaching emotion coaching (attending to emotions, helping children label and regulate emotions, while helping problem solving and keeping boundaries around behaviour) facilitates the development of emotional competence skills and whether this reduces behaviour problems in children. The intervention involves 60 children presenting to clinical services with behaviour problems and 100 kindergarten children from a community setting, all of whom are randomly allocated to intervention or wait-list control.

Should the intervention prove successful it is expected that parents receiving the intervention will be more able to appropriately respond to their children's emotions in ways that teaches children emotional competence. Validation of the intervention will provide support for a new method of preventing and/or reducing child behaviour problems, offering an important complement to behavioural-based interventions usually used by mental health practitioners.