Empowering Parents of Adolescents at Elevated Risk of Suicide: Co-Designing an Adaptation to a Coach-Assisted, Digital Parenting Intervention

Suicidal ideation and behaviours are common among adolescents. Parents play a fundamental protective role in the prevention of adolescent suicide, but many describe feeling ill-equipped in their caretaking role. This is despite prior research indicating that it is important for these parents to feel empowered to emotionally support their adolescent if they are experiencing suicidality. An online parenting program could offer parents flexible access to evidence-based parenting strategies. However, there are limited digital resources for these parents and, further, very little is known about how an intervention could be designed to support the empowerment of these parents. Therefore, the aim of the current study is to explore how an existing evidence-based, digital parenting intervention, Partners in Parenting (PiP+), could be adapted through co-design to empower parents. Four parents who have lived experience of caring for a suicidal adolescent, four young people who experienced suicidality during adolescence, and four experts in youth mental health/suicide prevention participated in four sets of co-design workshops to innovate adaptations to PiP+ to empower parents of suicidal adolescents. Affinity mapping was used to analyse and interpret findings. Three key themes highlight how a digital intervention could be innovated and adapted to empower parents caring for a suicidal adolescent. Specifically, for parents to feel empowered to parent a suicidal adolescent, a digital intervention should support them to (1) “deal with the now”; (2) “acknowledge needs and understand their role”, and (3) “hold hope for the future”. Further, ten sub-themes were developed illustrating different concepts related to these themes. Findings highlight how technological features could support parents to feel more empowered when caring for a suicidal adolescent. In conclusion, the proposed technological features illustrate how digital interventions can be adapted to empower parents in their role of emotionally supporting and managing the suicide risk of their adolescent.