A Randomized Controlled Trial of Two Parent–Child Parallel Interventions to Enhance Positive Adaptation of Immigrant Families in Hong Kong: The Moderating Role of Depressive Symptoms

Parents and children who have recently immigrated from the Chinese mainland to Hong Kong face various challenges, including psychological and sociocultural adaptation difficulties. In collaboration with community partners, our research team has developed and implemented culturally sensitive and preventive parent–child parallel interventions to enhance positive adaptation among immigrant parents and children. Two interventions were conducted in this randomized controlled trial: an emotion regulation (ER) arm, which addressed psychological adaptation by reducing parent–child conflicts and improving emotions, and an information provision (IP) arm targeting sociocultural adaptation by increasing participants’ knowledge about Hong Kong. The study randomly assigned 113 and 73 parent–child pairs (allocation ratio 3:2) into the ER and IP arms, respectively. Parents and children attended four two-hour weekly sessions of their assigned intervention and completed assessments before, immediately after, and one month following the intervention. The results showed that in the ER arm, parents showed improved positive affect, and children reported decreases in parent–child conflicts more than their counterparts in the IP arm. In the IP arm, parents and children increased their knowledge, and parents decreased sociocultural adaptation difficulties more than their counterparts in the ER arm. In addition, the moderation analyses showed that in both interventions, parents and children with elevated baseline depressive symptoms obtained greater benefits relative to their counterparts with fewer symptoms. Such marked improvements were seen among parents in negative affect and adaptation difficulties and among children in parent–child conflict, positive and negative affect in the ER arm. More improvements were noted among parents in negative affect and sociocultural adaptation difficulties and among children in negative affect in the IP arm. Future studies are suggested to develop and provide parent–child parallel interventions targeting both psychological and sociocultural adaptations to parents and children with heightened baseline depressive symptoms to facilitate their positive adaptation in Hong Kong.