The effectiveness of teaching children's executive functions through play, combined with transdiagnostic interventions of mothers' emotional problems, on anxiety, depression and sleep quality of children with learning disabilities

Improving executive functions through play is one of the ways to improve learning in children with learning problems, whose definite effectiveness needs clinical investigation. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of teaching children's executive functions through play combined with transdiagnostic interventions of mothers' emotional problems on anxiety, depression, and sleep quality of these children.

This semi-experimental research was conducted with a pretest-posttest and follow-up (two months) design on 42 children aged 7 to 9 years in two experimental groups and one control group. Experiment groups received the training of executive functions in a game way. The mothers of the children in the 2nd experimental group were taught the integrated protocol of transdiagnostic interventions, while the mothers of the 1st experimental group did not receive training as they were considered the control group of mothers in the 2nd experimental group. The data were analyzed in SPSS version 25 software using the analysis of variance test with repeated measures (α=0.05).

Significant differences were observed between the intervention groups and the control group in the variable of sleep quality in the follow-up and post-test phase (P<0.001), in the anxiety variables in the post-test phase (P=0.04) and follow-up (P=0.05), and in the variable of depression (P<0.001). It was found that the intervention improved the quality of children's sleep and boosted anxiety and depression indices in both intervention groups, and this effect was greater in the group of children and mothers (P<0.001)

The training of executive functions in the form of play with the transdiagnostic interventions of mothers' emotional problems was effective on the psychological symptoms and sleep quality of children with learning disabilities, which can be a part of the training program for educators to solve these problems.