RESEARCH ARTICLE The Good Enough Parenting early intervention schema therapy based program: Participant experience John Philip Louis ID 1¤ *, Vida Ortiz 2 , Joanna Barlas 3 , Joyce Sue Lee 2 , George Lockwood 4 , Wayne Freeman ChongID 2 , Karen McDonald Louis 2 , Patricia Sim 2 1 Persatuan Kebajikan HOPE Worldwide Kuala Lumpur, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2 HOPE Worldwide Singapore, Singapore, Singapore, 3 James Cook University, Singapore, Singapore, 4 Schema Therapy Institute Midwest, Kalamazoo, Michigan, United States of America ¤ Current address: 1 Edgefield Walk, Singapore * johnphiliplouis@gmail.com Abstract Background and objectives Schema therapy (ST) has become a mainstream therapy for the treatment of psychopathol- ogy and has been validated through a series of large scale, international randomized control trials. Among other things, schema therapy emphasizes the meeting of core emotional needs in children by primary caregivers as these unmet needs continue to adversely affect their lives into adulthood. An early intervention parenting program has been developed to help parents meet these core emotional needs in order to prevent the development of psy- chopathology in the first place. The program, Good Enough Parenting, is equally focused on reducing problems and strengthening parenting practices, regardless of where the child is on the “disordered to well-being continuum”. This study aims to explore “patient experience” by users of this program. Best clinical research guidelines advocate that participants should be used as collaborators rather than pure recipients; this process should predate large scale trials. Design An exploratory qualitative study with 55 parent-participants of Good Enough Parenting was conducted. Methods One-to-one interviews were conducted with participants, using critical incident technique and guided by semi-structured interview schedule, to explore their experiences with the pro- gram. Transcripts were then analyzed using thematic analysis. Results Coding showed a high degree of inter-rater reliability (kappa value of 0.78). The themes that emerged were Cultivating Awareness of Parents’ Own Schemas, Cultivating Intentionality, PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0243508 January 22, 2021 1 / 25 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Louis JP, Ortiz V, Barlas J, Lee JS, Lockwood G, Chong WF, et al. (2021) The Good Enough Parenting early intervention schema therapy based program: Participant experience. PLoS ONE 16(1): e0243508. https://doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pone.0243508 Editor: Bronwyn Myers, South African Medical Research Council, SOUTH AFRICA Received: March 26, 2020 Accepted: November 22, 2020 Published: January 22, 2021 Copyright: © 2021 Louis et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting information file. Transcripts are available upon request to Phua Hee, pheerless@gmail.com. Mr. Phua Hee is also the part of the ethics committee of this research. Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. Competing interests: The author(s) declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: John P. Louis and Karen M. Louis