The Impact of Barkley's Parent Training Program on the Improvement of the Mother-Child Relationship among Anxious Students

This research was undertaken to investigate the impact of Barkley’s Parent Training Program on the improvement of the mother-child relationship among anxious primary school students in Farsan County, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province. This quasi-experimental study had a pretest-posttest control group design. The instruments included the Spence Childrenchr('39')s Anxiety Scale (SCAS) (1997) and Child-Parent Relationship Scale (CPRS) (Pianta, 1992) (with three subscales of proximity, dependency and conflict). First, SCAS was administered to screen primary school students in Farsan in 2016-17 school year for anxiety. In the next step, multi-stage random sampling method was utilized to select 30 individuals. These students were assigned to an experimental (N=15) and a control group (N=15). Before administering the intervention and training mothers, the subjects of both groups took the Child-Parent Relationship Scale as pretest. Then, the experimental group received Barkley’s Parent Training Program for 10 sessions, whereas the control group did not receive any intervention. After training mothers, the CPRS was administered to both experimental and control groups as posttest. The results of MANCOVA indicated that Barkley’s Parent Training Program improved the parent-child relationship (F= 28.27; P=0.000). The findings revealed that this program had a positive effect on all three subscales of proximity, dependence, and conflict and it resulted in their improvement.