The purpose of this study was to develop social skills training program and parent education for aggressive young children and their parents, and to investigate the effects of the program. A social skills training program aims not only to decrease agg...
The purpose of this study was to develop social skills training program and parent education for aggressive young children and their parents, and to investigate the effects of the program. A social skills training program aims not only to decrease aggressive children’s aggressiveness but also to improve their prosocial behavior, emotion regulation ability and social skills, and a parent education program aims to cause positive changes in parents’ parenting behaviors, to reduce parenting stress and to enhance parenting sense of competence. The social skills training program developed in this study is composed of 3 stages: Introduction stage, development stage and finishing stage. The introduction stage (Session 1-2) forms the rapport between the program executor and young children, the development stage (Session 3-14) gives the children understanding and training of cognitive, emotional, behavioral and social skills, and the finishing stage (Session 15-16) reviews what have been learned in the previous sessions. The parent education program is composed of 8 sessions and 3 stages. The introduction stage (Session 1) forms the rapport between the executor and parents and deals with the understanding of aggressive children. The development stage (Session 2-7) helps parents correct their inappropriate parenting behaviors, and acquire the understanding and skills of various parenting behaviors. The finishing stage (Session 8) reviews what have been learned in previous sessions in order to generalize the democratic parenting at home. The social skills training program is implemented through a total of 16 sessions, 2 sessions per week and 50 minutes per session, and the parenting education program is executed through a total of 8 sessions, 1 session per week and 2 hours per session.
In order to verify the effects of the developed programs, the pretest-posttest control group design was used. The subjects of this study were 20 aggressive children whose scores of aggressiveness based on teacher report and peer report belonged to the top 20% among 128 4-5-year-old children at C Kindergarten at N-gu, Seoul. The aggressive children were divided into Intervention Group Ⅰ(n=6) who participated in both the social skills training program and the parent education program, Intervention Group Ⅱ (n=7) who participated only in the social skills training program, and a control group (n=7) who did not receive any intervention. Ordinary Group of children was non-aggressive children who participated in this study for comparison with the aggressive children.
Using frequency analysis, percentiles were calculated based on each young child’s teacher and peer report, and Cronbach' α was calculated in order to test internal consistency among the questions of each scale. Before the programs were applied, one-way ANOVA was performed for each of child-related variables and parent-related variables in order to confirm the homogeneity between the intervention groups, the control group and the ordinary group. In addition, paired t-test was performed to see if each variable was significantly different in each group before and after the programs. After the programs were applied, one-way ANOVA was performed for each of child-related variables and parent-related variables in order to confirm the differences of the intervention groups, the control group and the ordinary group. Along with these quantitative analyses, each young child’s behavior videotaped during the social skills training was also observed and evaluated.
The major results of this study were summarized as follows:
Through the pretest implemented prior to the application of the programs, most of the child-related variables confirm the homogeneity of the intervention groups and the control group. According to the differences between pretests and posttests, as to child-related variables, Intervention Group Ⅰ and Intervention Group Ⅱ showed a significant decrease of aggression in both teacher report and peer report after the programs. On the contrary, the control group showed a significant increase in the score of aggression. Intervention Group Ⅰ and Intervention Group Ⅱ showed a significant increase of prosocial behavior only in teacher report. Only Intervention Group Ⅱ showed significant increase in emotion regulation ability and some of social skills after the program. As to parent-related variables, the mothers in Intervention Group Ⅰ showed significant increases in affectionate parenting behavior and receptive parenting behavior compared to the mothers of the other two groups.
As a result of posttest of four groups, children's aggression, prosocial behavior, emotion control ability and social skills weren't significantly different among Intervention Group Ⅰ, Intervention Group Ⅱ, and Ordinary Group. As to parent-related variables, the mothers in Intervention Group Ⅰ showed the most affectionate/receptive parenting behaviors compared to the mothers of the other three groups. The reject/control parenting behaviors and difficult temperament of mother's parenting stress weren't significantly different between Intervention Group Ⅰ, Intervention Group Ⅱ, and Ordinary Group. Furthermore, it was observed that decreases in young children’s aggression and improvements in their prosocial behavior, emotion regulation ability and social skills during the implementation of the programs. In conclusion, the intervention programs developed in this study were found to be effective in helping aggressive children, and compared to the parent education program, the social skills training program showed a particularly high effect on young children’s behavioral change.
This study developed and implemented a social skills training program and a parent education program for aggressive children and their parents, and found their own effects. The developed intervention programs are meaningful in that they have interventive effects on reducing children's aggression in their own early childhood years. Simultaneously, it could also prevent severe problem behaviors that might occur in the future when such behaviors are neglected without any intervention. Therefore, these programs are expected to be applied as useful materials that could help both the aggressive children and their parents in community centers and educational institutions such as child day care centers and kindergartens.