Family-centered support, placing parents and families to important environmental components for children with disabilities, is being on the rise as recent changes into an ecological view have significantly affected support for family of children with ...
Family-centered support, placing parents and families to important environmental components for children with disabilities, is being on the rise as recent changes into an ecological view have significantly affected support for family of children with disabilities. As such, parental roles are to be more active than ever as well as relationships between families and professionals are being transformed into more collaborative and companionate ones which used to be unilateral or even vertical. A parenting support program of reinforcing competency of parents is a program that increases their confidences by promoting relevant knowledge and specialty and provides family with information and available regional resources surrounding them resulting elimination of a helplessness feeling and strengthen immanent merits of their family. In addition, it is to promote parents' specialties, provide physical and psychological support for using the given resources, and consolidate capability of families. Through discourse of group meeting, the families are to cultivate their knowledge and skills and meet another families having children with disabilities which leads them to share feeling and sympathy of hardship they have and gain psychological state of balance. Also, through individualized home visit, parents get to practice their newly learned knowledge and skills and set goal that are suitable to their family environment as well as situation, and collaborate with professionals to deliver the intervention, and cross-check their spouses.
The purpose of the study is to examine the effects of the parenting support program on Parenting Sense of Competence and Parent-Child Interaction in Parents of Young Children with Disabilities.
Sixteen families(the total of thirty two people) of children with disabilities, residing Seoul or Geong-gi provice and having children between the age of 2 to 6 diagnosed as disability or developmental delayed, participated for the study. They were to actively implement strategies learned from individual interviews with researcher and take part in seven times of group sessions and five times of home based programs. The families were divided into two groups of eight families each, composed of sixteen people. For seven months, the experimental group was provided with the parenting support program on Parenting Sense of Competence including recruiting process of the participants of the study. 'Parenting Sense of Competence(Gibaund-Wallston & Wandersman, 1978)’ and 'Maternal Behavior Rating Scales(Mahoney, 1990)' were used to examine the effect of the parenting support program on Parenting Sense of Competence and Parent-Child Interaction in Parents of Young Children with Disabilities.
To prove the result of the program, pretest-posttest was applied. The differences between pre-test and post-test of the two groups were analyzed using independent t-test for parenting sense of competence and those of experimental group were analyzed using dependent t-test for parent-child interaction.
The result of the study were as follows;
First, a significant difference was found from the experimental group in parenting sense of competency levels of mothers presenting a notable high level comparing to the control group.
Second, a significant difference was not found between the experimental group and the control group in parenting sense of competency levels of fathers participated in the programs.
Third, a significant difference between pre-test and post-test was found in parent's interaction behavior with child was found in the experimental group.
Forth, a significant difference between pre-test and post-test was found in child's interaction behavior with parents was found in the experimental group.
Fifth, a consistency of changes was observed in improved parent-child interaction level twelve weeks after the program closing.
Based on the above results, parenting support program for parent empowerment gives positive affects on parenting sense of competence and parent-child interactions in parenting children with disabilities. With this, various studies on parenting support program for parent empowerment regarding diverse programs with subjects and contents are necessary in order to benefit more parents and families of children with disabilities.