The effectiveness of mothers’ mindfulness-basedcognitive therapy on externalizing disorder of aggressivechildren

Many children’s physical, cognitive, behavioral and emotional disorders are caused by mothers’ emotional disturbances. These mothers show weakness in playing the parental role, which will lead to an increase in behavioral disorders in the child. The aim of the research was to effectiveness of mothers’ mindfulness-based cognitive therapy on externalizing disorder of aggressive children.

This study was an experimental study with a pretest-posttest design with a control group. From the population of female primary school students in Namin city in the academic year of 1997-98 (540 people), a sample of 40 people based on high scores on the aggression scale was selected by multi-stage cluster sampling method and randomly divided into two groups of 20 people (An experimental group and a control group) were replaced. Every student who was selected in this way, his mother was also selected as a sample in the research. Overt and relational Shahim’s Aggression Scale and Achenbach& Rescolar’s Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). The experimental group received 8 sessions of 2-hour mindfulnessbased cognitive therapy and the control group did not receive any intervention. Univariate and multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) were used to analyze the data.

The calculated values showed that cognitive therapy based on mothers’ mindfulness has an effect on reducing the externalizing problems of in children (p < 0.05).

According to the results of the study, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy can be considered as effective interventions in reducing externalizing problems in children. Mothers’ mindfulness improves their adaptive performance in awareness and attention to interaction with children, unconditional acceptance without judgment of children’s behaviors and the ability to regulate their reactions to children.