Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on Academic Resilience of Children With Physical-Motor Disabilities and Their Mothers’ Life Expectancy

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is one of the third wave of behavior therapies. One of its main goals is to improve psychological flexibility which can increase the life expectancy and promote the mental health. This study aims to assess the effectiveness of ACT on mothers' life expectancy and academic resilience of children with physical-motor disabilities.

The quasi-experimental study with a pre-test/post-test/follow-up design was conducted from October 2019 to March 2020. Participants were 30 children with physical-motor disabilities and their mothers, who were selected by a purposive sampling method. Participants were assigned into two groups of intervention and control using the block randomization method. The intervention group received ACT at 10 sessions of 120 minutes per week. Participants completed a demographic checklist, Miller Hope Scale, and Academic Resilience Scale at pre-test, post-test and one-month follow-up phases. The collected data were analyzed by repeated measures analysis of variance in SPSS v. 23 software.

The effectiveness of ACT in improving the mothers’ life expectancy and children’s academic resilience was statistically significant in post-test phase (P<0.01). The effects of ACT remained stable in the one-month follow-up period (P<0.05).

The ACT is effective in improving the psychological characteristics of children with physical-motor disabilities and their mothers. It can be used for clinical treatment of children with special needs.