Designing a cognitive-behavioral empowerment program for mothers of children with autism spectrum disorder and its effectiveness on improving the interaction with the child

The preset study aimed to design and investigate the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral empowerment program on mothers of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder on improving the interaction with the child. this study was semi-experimental with pretest and posttest design, and control group. The statistical population was 30 volunteer mothers with autistic children from among whom  24 mothers were selected by convenience sampling method and were randomly assigned into experiment and control groups. The cognitive-behavioral empowerment program was designed and performed for the experiment group. The experiment group received a cognitive-behavioral empowerment program in 12 sessions of 90 minutes, while the control group did not receive training. Pianta Child-Parent Relationship Scale (CPRS) was used to investigate the effect of cognitive-behavioral empowerment program. Analysis of data by analysis of covariance in SPSS-22 showed that cognitive-behavioral empowerment was effective on reducing the conflicts and dependence and increasing intimacy between mothers and children with autism spectrum disorder (P<0.001). The results indicated that cognitive-behavioral empowerment program reduced the conflicts and dependency and increased the subscale of intimacy between the mother and the child. The present study played an important role in increasing information about the child-parent relationship in children and adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder through training the parents especially the mothers.