Podcast: Training parents of anxiety prone toddlers
In this episode, we talk with Leonie Vreeke and Nina Komrij about the Cool Little Kids research project. CLK explores the effectiveness of training parents of anxiety prone toddlers to prevent their children from developing anxiety on a later age. Want to learn more about their research and discover why it's important to recognize anxiety prone behaviour and provide tools to parents? Then listen to episode 7 of the Leiden Psychology Podcast!
Leiden Psychology Podcast
This podcast series is a special project within the department of Psychology at Leiden University. It gives a platform for people to discuss topics within the field of psychology from different perspectives; the perspective of students, of university staff, alumni, and different researchers. Listen to Leonie Vreeke and Nina Komrij about their research on training parents of anxiety prone toddlers in the latest episode.
Meet the Researchers
Leonie Vreeke is the project leader on the Cool Little Kids research project and works as an assistant professor at Leiden University. For years she has been researching shy, withdrawn behaviour in pre-schoolers and its relation to anxiety problems. In her PhD research at Erasmus University Rotterdam, she investigated a questionnaire to measure this shy, withdrawn behaviour properly, and looked at the influence of parental fear and parenting behaviour on this behaviour.
Nina is executive researcher on the research project and working as a PhD student at Leiden University. She graduated in 'Health Sciences' from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2020. Here she specialized in health promotion and the prevention of health problems among youth.
Cool Little Kids
Cool Little Kids is a research project that aims to evaluate the (cost)effectiveness of the Cool Little Kids intervention (developed in Australia) in reducing the severity of anxiety problems in children aged 2 - 6 years in the Netherlands. This brief parenting program provides psychoeducation to parents about the nature and development of, and risks for anxiety disorders. Parents are also taught practical ways to reduce child anxiety through graded exposure, contingency management, reduction of overprotective behaviours, and management of their own fears and worries. In addition, they also examine the mediating role of parental anxiety and overprotective parenting on intervention outcomes and to examine treatment integrity and parents' satisfaction.