Home is the place which cultivates a child to an independent person, and parents share important experiences with the child in its early stage of life affecting child's overall development and formation of personality. Therefore, home is a very import...
Home is the place which cultivates a child to an independent person, and parents share important experiences with the child in its early stage of life affecting child's overall development and formation of personality. Therefore, home is a very important environment for children to grow and any change that comes from family can directly influence the child. With changes in family structure like parental divorce, a child under a single parent can suffer emotional confusion, which can appear as externalizing problematic behavior. Also, single parent may go through changes in child-rearing attitude, and the child under single parent can experience low self-esteem as the psychological support system weakens.
Thus, this study aims at providing therapeutic intervention with art therapy to a single parent family child with psychological atrophy and externalized behavior problems in order to alleviate the child's psychological and externalizing problems and help the child grow up and develop healthy.
The study questions for this research were as follows.
1. How does art therapy affect the self-esteem in a single parent family child?
2. How does art therapy affect the externalized behavior problems in a single parent family child?
The object of this study is 11-year old girl who lives with two elder brothers under her divorced father. The target child was referred to a welfare agency located in S city for the symptoms of externalization problems like aggressive verbal expressions and behavior, lack of cognition on her misbehavior, and inability to concentrate on something and lack of self-esteem. The art therapy was performed to the child one or two times a week, 28 sessions in total, from July 30, 2019 to January 17, 2020.
To compare the study results of the pre and post tests, TRF (Teacher's Report Form), Behavioral Assessment Scale for Children and Adolescents, Self-Esteem Inventory by Coopersmith, and HTP (House-Tree-Person) and KSD(Kinetic School Drawing) were used as the research measurement tests. In addition, the therapy process of each session was tape recorded, and the child's drawings and art works were analyzed qualitatively.
The final results of this study are as follows.
First, art therapy was found to have a positive effect on improving child's self-esteem. As the therapy sessions progress, the child became to be satisfied with her drawings, and was more proud of herself. And she also expressed satisfaction with her family relation and relationship with friends. The total score in Self-Esteem Inventory after the therapy was increased up to 30 points compared with the score before the therapy. Except for the sub-domain of academic self-esteem, the points in each of other three sub-domains have increased up to 10 points.
Second, art therapy was found to have a positive effect on alleviating externalized behavior problems of the child. Her externalized behavior problems like distractive, inattentive, and talkative features and aggressive attitude in early sessions had been alleviated over the sessions. She was aware of her own misbehavior and tried to control herself. In the pre and post TRF test scores, T score was lowered by more than 10 points after the therapy, falling within the normal range, proving that art therapy was effective for child's externalized behavior problems.
Based on these results, art therapy turned out to have a positive effect on improving low self-esteem and externalized behavior problems of a child under single parent. It seems that the compassionate and receptive atmosphere in the art therapy provided her with psychological comfort and allowed her to express her negative feelings in a safe way and eventually this therapeutic process has enhanced her self esteem.
However, as this study was conducted on one child, it is difficult to generalize results of this study to all the children living under single parent. Given that previous researches on art therapy to treat externalized behavior problems of children under single parent have focused mainly on aggressiveness, it seems very necessary to deal with a variety of externalized behavior problems in future studies