Mindfulness Education on Resilience and Happiness of Mothers with Children with Learning Disabilities

Learning disabilities can have negative consequences for both the individual and the family, and in particular due to the close relationship between mother and child for mothers. This disability can affect an individual's daily activities. Because the memory, reasoning, and ability to solve the problem in these children are painful. This disorder can provide challenges for the child in the social, emotional, and educational context. The history of research shows that the mothers of a child with a learning disorder have psychological stress and crisis and threatens the existence of a disabled child, compromise, and physical and mental health. Learning disability is a problem that affects the family and disturbs the mental function of mothers. The two components of psychological interest in this process are the maturity and happiness of mothers. Considering the newness of this therapeutic approach, its effectiveness on mental problems of mothers with children with special conditions seems to be necessary and can be transformed in psychotherapy of psychological issues. Also, due to the existence of psychological stress and low level of joy and happiness among mothers with a child with learning disorder and the existence of a research vacuum in the field of teaching the effectiveness of mindfulness on the purpose of this study was to determine the effect of mental education Knowledge about the level of resilience and happiness in mothers of children with learning disorder.

The research method was semi-experimental with pretest-posttest design with two experimental and control groups. The statistical population of this study included all mothers with children with a learning disorder in Tehran. Callings made in psychology and social networks and 45 mothers were selected using available sampling. Following a resiliency and happiness test for these 45 people, 12 eliminated and 33 had entry criteria. The criteria for entering mothers was to have a child with learning disabilities and no–divorce. Of the 33 patients, 30 patients willing to receive eight treatment sessions were entered into the study and randomly divided into two groups of control and test. Exit criteria were also a session absent during the course of treatment. The research tools were Conner and Davidson's Resilience Scale (2003) and Happiness Argyle et al. (1989). For the experimental group, eight sessions of 90 minutes of mindfulness training performed. For both groups, pre-test and post-test performed. To observe the ethical principles of research for the control group, after the research sessions, therapeutic sessions were also provided, and the confidentiality of the data of the research samples was assured. Finally, by using SPSS software version 20, Independent T-tests used to compare the age of the two groups and covariance test to measure the effectiveness at the level of 0.05 to analyze the findings.

The results showed that the mean of the resilience of the experimental group was 45.14±7.15 in the pretest to 61.41±9.96 in the posttest and the mean of happiness was 35.78±7.52 up to 52.74±9.34 increased. The result of covariance analysis showed that after eliminating the effect of pre–test, the mean scores of post–test of two groups were statistically significant (p<0.001).

This study shows that mental education for mothers with children with learning disabilities is useful, and it is effective in increasing the resilience and happiness of mothers. In other words, this study suggests that Mindfulness Education can be used for mothers with children with learning disabilities and can be used as a psychological intervention along with other interventions. It can also be an excellent treatment to increase the resilience and happiness of mothers with children with learning disabilities.