Emotional Availability (EA) Brief: Single Session Feedback and Coaching for Improving Fathers’ Emotional Availability for Children Across a Wide Developmental Spectrum

Abstract

Fathers are a historically underrepresented population in developmental research and must be considered for their modern presentation in parenting processes. Emotional Availability (EA) is a construct that captures the parent-child relationship quality and predicts positive outcomes for children. A recently developed intervention, the EA Brief, is a program conceptualized for easy administration that may be utilized to improve father-child dyadic functioning across a range of child ages. The final sample of interested fathers was 18 fathers with children between 4-months and 13.5-years. For pretest sessions, all fathers completed surveys (demographic information, the Emotional Availability Self Report, and the Flourishing Scale) via Qualtrics, followed by a 20-minute filmed interaction via Zoom which was later coded for EA. Immediate Intervention Group (IIG) received one pretest before the intervention and one posttest after the intervention over a 3-5 week intervention delivery. The intervention involved a 2-hour interactive Zoom workshop where information about EA, attachment, and mindfulness was provided, a 1-hour individualized, Zoom EA feedback/coaching session, and two weeks of text reminders about the covered content. In contrast to the IIG, the Waitlist Control (WC) participants received two pretests (same assessments as above) separated by the 3-5 week time period corresponding to the timing of intervention delivery for the IIG. After the second pretest, they received the same intervention as the IIG. All IIG and WC fathers received posttest sessions (exact same assessments as for the pretests noted above). Across 16 target variables assessing EA, six observed variables showed post-intervention improvement (α < 0.05) though no significant findings were found on self-reported measures. These findings suggest that fathers respond to programs that provide guidance for clinically informed, research-based parenting despite the program having limited effect on their self-perceptions of how they parent.