The Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) in Decreasing the Parenting Stress of Mothers

This study considers decreasing the parenting stress of the mothers of female students in elementary schools through acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) in. It is a semi-experimental study, involving a pretest, a posttest and a control group. The statistical population consisted of all mothers of the female students in elementary schools of Khomeinishahr (Isfahan) in 2016-18. Sixty students were selected by convenience sampling and subdivided into two groups: an acceptance and commitment therapy experimental group and a control group. The experimental group subjects received family related training based on acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) for ten 90-minute sessions while the control group received no training. The tool of this research was the Parenting Stress Index (PSI) (Abidin, 1990). The results of the analysis of covariance showed that in the sequence of controlling the impression of pretest, there is a meaningful difference between the experimental group and the control group in posttest around some variables such as the sense of competence, parent affection, role limitations, depression, the relation with husband, the total territory of parents, the total territory of child and parenting stress (P