Not All Parenting Programs Are Equal: What Behaviour Management Misses

In 2023, the Australian Child Maltreatment Study (ACMS) delivered the most comprehensive national picture of child abuse and neglect this country has ever produced. Its call to action in the Medical Journal of Australia did not mince words.

"The new findings about the searing impact of emotional abuse demand a revolution in our relational world, requiring change in what we say to our children, and how we say it."

That is a striking phrase to appear in a public health journal. It is also a precise description of what relational, play-based approaches to parent-child therapy have been working toward for sixty years. The question is whether Australia’s funding frameworks are paying attention.

Three major policy documents now position parenting supports as the primary vehicle for prevention and early intervention in children’s mental health. The National Children’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy committed $42.3 million to parenting education and support. Victoria’s Royal Commission into Mental Health called for a new infant, child and family mental health system explicitly recognising the critical role of parents and carers, including group-based parenting sessions. The ACMS called for a national prevention strategy led by health, education and early childhood sectors, substantially improving parenting supports to help families thrive.

The ACMS call to action goes further still. It explicitly names parenting education programs as a key prevention mechanism, and calls for educational practitioners to be equipped to provide trauma-informed responses, and to avoid harmful responses such as school exclusion.

This is not a peripheral recommendation. It sits alongside calls for investment in parenting supports, early childhood services, and school-based prevention as part of a coordinated ecological approach to child maltreatment. The question of which parenting programs, and which educational approaches, get funded to deliver that vision is therefore not a clinical preference. It is a policy decision with significant public health consequences.

The mandate is clear. The question it leaves unanswered is which parenting supports, delivering which theory of change, and measuring which outcomes. Because not all parent programs are equal, and the difference matters more than current policy conversations acknowledge.

Australian families navigating children’s behavioural and emotional challenges will most commonly encounter one of a handful of programs.

Triple P, the Positive Parenting Program, targets parenting skills and behaviour management through a tiered, population-level model. It has a large evidence base and flexible delivery. Tuning into Kids builds parental emotional literacy and capacity to respond to children’s inner emotional experience, grounded in Gottman’s emotion coaching framework. Circle of Security-Parenting works at the level of the parent’s attachment representations, helping parents understand their child’s attachment needs and recognise their own defensive responses to those needs.

Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), as discussed in the first piece in this series, is a behaviourally grounded intervention delivered through live coaching behind a one-way mirror, targeting conduct problems in children aged two to seven.

Each of these programs has genuine merit. Each has an evidence base. And each addresses a different layer of what children need.

When you map the skills these programs actually teach, a pattern emerges.

Triple P and PCIT work primarily at the level of behaviour: what the parent does, how the child responds, and how that interaction is shaped over time. Both draw on social learning theory and operant conditioning. Both measure success through observable behavioural change.

Tuning into Kids and Circle of Security work at the level of the parent’s inner world: their emotional literacy, their attachment representations, their capacity to see the child as a person with needs rather than a behaviour to be managed. Neither targets behaviour directly.

Filial Therapy sits in a different position entirely. It is unique in crossing theoretical lines, integrating psychodynamic, humanistic, behavioural, cognitive, attachment, developmental, and family systems approaches into a single cohesive framework.

Yet it is relationship- and process-oriented rather than outcome-oriented — it does not present the therapist as an expert with a prescription, but as a collaborative partner who combines their professional knowledge with the parent’s intimate knowledge of their own child.

In practice, parents are trained to conduct child-centred play sessions, not to manage behaviour, but to follow the child’s lead, reflect their emotional experience, and become the therapeutic change agent in their child’s life, under the guidance of a Registered Play and Filial Therapist. The parent isn’t performing skills under live direction. They are becoming someone their child experiences as safe, growing and learning together through a playful relationship.

Play is central to this — not incidental, but by design. Filial Therapy recognises play as the child’s primary avenue for gaining understanding of their world, expressing feelings, mastering new experiences, and developing social judgment and problem-solving capacities. Play is therapeutically beneficial for children. And when parents provide that therapeutic environment, the play sessions themselves become restorative and life-enhancing.

Both individual family and group delivery models are more accessible and less resource-intensive than a purpose-built clinic with specialist equipment. The approach has been researched across a far wider age range than PCIT, from young children through to adolescents, without requiring progressive modifications to its core model. And because filial therapy is built around the parent's intimate knowledge of their own child within their own cultural context, it is inherently better positioned for multicultural application than a model reliant on standardised verbal praise scripts and prescribed discipline procedures. VanFleet notes that children's play is universal — when given the opportunity, children play within the cultural environment in which they live — and the non-directive approach permits children to play out their concerns within their own cultural context, with parents rather than clinicians as the primary interpreters of meaning.

The distinction matters. In Filial Therapy, play and playful relating are not the context for learning skills. They are the mechanism of change.

Bratton and colleagues’ landmark 2005 meta-analysis found effect sizes of d = 1.15 across outcomes for filial therapy, drawing on 93 studies spanning 1953 to 2000, with the parent-led, clinician-supported subgroup showing significantly greater effects than clinician-delivered play therapy. Lin and Bratton’s 2015 re-analysis, drawing on 52 studies with more conservative methodology, produced an overall effect size of d = .47, small-to-medium, and notably .76 for children of colour.

The shift in effect size between these two analyses reflects something worth naming honestly. More recent RCT methodology — increasingly the gold standard for evidence evaluation — was developed primarily in adult clinical research contexts and is not always paediatrically sensitive. Randomised controlled trials in child and family therapy face particular methodological challenges: ethical constraints on withholding treatment from control groups, the difficulty of blinding participants to intervention, and outcome measures designed around adult symptom reduction rather than child developmental wellbeing. A more modest effect size in a rigorously designed RCT does not necessarily mean a less effective intervention — it may mean the measuring instrument is a poor fit for what is actually changing.

Direct comparison of effect sizes across programs is also complicated by methodology: filial therapy meta-analyses have typically used Cohen’s d across large study pools, while smaller program evaluations — including Circle of Security’s 2016 meta-analysis of 10 studies — have used Hedges’ g, a corrected measure more appropriate for smaller samples. These figures are not directly equivalent. What the evidence does show, across programs and methodologies, is that each approach produces meaningful change — in different domains, for different populations, measured by different tools. That is precisely the argument for a funded ecosystem rather than a single default model.

The methodological debate is real and worth engaging with honestly. But there is a counter-argument the policy conversation has not yet absorbed. Measuring Filial Therapy primarily against externalising behaviour outcomes is a narrow lens that systematically misses the intervention’s actual targets. Filial Therapy aims to shift the relational infrastructure of the parent-child relationship, building the child’s capacity for emotional regulation, secure attachment, and self-directed problem-solving. These outcomes are not easily captured in behavioural symptom checklists.

The current research evaluation framework, built around deficit and disorder models, systematically disadvantages relational and play-based approaches. That is not an argument against rigour. It is an argument for expanding what we measure, particularly when major national studies are calling for a revolution in our relational world.

Here is what the skills mapping reveals when you look across all of these programs together.

No existing mainstream program integrates play and playful relationships as a therapeutic medium. Some programs use play incidentally. Some encourage parents to spend time playing with their children. But none of them position the quality of playful relating, the non-directive, child-led, emotionally attuned relational stance, as the engine of therapeutic change — and then equip the parent to enact it, with access to ongoing support from the clinician.

This is not a minor gap. Play is the child's primary language for processing experience, expressing emotional truth, and building relational safety. A child rights framework positions children as active participants in their own development, with inner lives and the right to be understood on their own terms.

Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognises every child's right to play, rest, and leisure — yet this right is rarely considered when designing or funding therapeutic interventions for children.

A neuro-affirming lens recognises that play is not supplementary to children's communication — it is how many children, particularly neurodivergent children, most fully and naturally express themselves. An intervention ecosystem that has no place for play and playful relating as a therapeutic medium is an ecosystem built around adult communication styles, adult outcome measures, and adult theories of change. It is not rights-affirming. It is not neuro-affirming. And it is not, in any meaningful sense, a revolution in our relational world.

TORA, ORA, and CORA, the school and community-facing tiers of the Multi-Tiered Play Therapy Framework, address this gap systematically. TORA trains teachers in the relational skills that create therapeutically playful classroom environments. ORA brings those principles into community parent cohorts. CORA extends them into a diverse range of community settings. Together with Filial Therapy, Group Play Therapy and individualised Play Therapy (when needed), they constitute a vertically integrated system with a shared theoretical base and increasing clinical intensity, something no combination of mainstream programs currently replicates.

Three major national and state policy frameworks have called for investment in parenting supports as prevention and early intervention. As the investment starts to flow, the question will be whether it flows toward programs that can actually deliver the relational revolution the evidence demands.

Funding frameworks that treat evidence-based as a single category, and that default to the most recently profiled or behaviourally familiar program, will consistently underinvest in approaches whose evidence base requires a more sophisticated integrated design, delivered by paediatric specialists.

The ACMS did not call for better behaviour management. It called for change in what we say to our children, and how we say it. That is a relational claim. It deserves a relational response.

A child who feels behaviourally managed is not the same as a child who feels known. Funding frameworks that cannot hold that distinction will keep building systems that mistake one for the other.

Australian Government Department of Health (2021). National Children’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy.

Bratton, S. C., Ray, D., Rhine, T., & Jones, L. (2005). The efficacy of play therapy with children: A meta-analytic review of treatment outcomes. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 36(4), 376–390.

Guerney, L. F., & Ryan, V. M. (2013). Group filial therapy: The complete guide to teaching parents to play therapeutically with their children. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Lin, Y-W., & Bratton, S. C. (2015). A meta-analytic review of child-centered play therapy approaches. Journal of Counseling and Development, 93(1), 45–58.

Mathews, B., Thomas, H. J., & Scott, J. G. (2023). A new era in child maltreatment prevention: call to action. Medical Journal of Australia, 218(6 Suppl), S47–S51.

Renshaw, K. (2022). Developing an evidence-based universal play therapy framework for schools [PhD thesis]. Deakin University.

Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System (2021). Final Report, Volume 3. State of Victoria.

VanFleet, R. (2005). Filial therapy: Strengthening parent-child relationships through play (2nd ed.). Sarasota, FL: Professional Resource Press.

Dr Kate Renshaw (PhD, APPTA: RPT-S™) is a Registered Play Therapist, researcher, educator, author, and advocate with over 20 years of experience working therapeutically with children and families. She is the developer of the TORA and the Multi-Tier Play Therapy (MTPT) framework, and is the founding director of Play & Filial Therapy. Her work spans clinical practice, doctoral research, sole-authored practitioner guidebooks, parliamentary advocacy, and international conference presentations. She is based in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia.

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