Effectiveness of a mother-child attachment-based intervention on health indices in mothers of children with chronic disease

Pediatric disease affects the health condition of their mothers. The present study conducted with the aim of examining the effectiveness of a mother-child attachment-based intervention on health indices in mothers of children with a chronic disease. Method of the present study was experimental with a pre/post-test design. The subjects were twenty-two mothers who volunteered for this randomized controlled trial and had a child undergoing medical treatment for their chronic disease. After being evaluated by a battery of questionnaires that included Parenting Stress Index (PSI; Abidin, 1990) and 28-form General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28; Goldberg & Hillier, 1979) mothers were paired on the basis of health subscales scores, age, the number of family children, and the kind of their child’s disease. Each one of paired mothers was then randomly assigned to an experimental or a control group. Mothers in experimental group received ten sessions of mother-child attachment-based intervention over a 5-weeks period with their children. Meanwhile, mothers and children in control group received 10 simple conversational sessions without any psychological intervention, as a dummy intervention. Both groups were evaluated again after completing their respective treatment regimens. Multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) showed significant differences between two groups after treatment and revealed significant changes in mothers’ health indices including competency, social isolation, attachment to child, health, physical syndrome, anxiety and depression, in experimental group in pre-post-treatment stages comparison. It can be concluded that mother-child attachment-based intervention would improve quality of health in mothers of children with chronic disease.