The Effectiveness of attachment based therapy on decreasing Parenting Stress in mothers with elementary boys

Parental stress is a cultural interplay and is subject to specific family and living conditions. Also, parental stress interacts with warmth, affection, and intimacy in parent-child relationships. Attachment-based intervention is a relationship-based approach that strengthens the child-parent relationship. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of attachment-based intervention training on reducing parental stress in mothers of primary school boys.Research The statistical population of this quasi-experimental study was male students of elementary school (first grade), district 4 of education in Tehran, who were studying in the academic year of 2019. For this purpose, the mothers of 300 students responded to the Parental Stress Questionnaire (Abidin Short Form, 1983). Then, among the mothers who had high parental stress according to the questionnaire (the criteria for entering the study were mothers who had a standard deviation above the mean of the parental stress questionnaire), 30 mothers were selected by available sampling method and They were randomly assigned into two groups of intervention and control (15 patients in each group). Ten sessions of attachment-based intervention (including four 120-minute group sessions and six 60-minute individual sessions) were administered to the intervention group and the control group received no intervention. Data were analyzed using multivariate covariance analysis and time series design. The results showed that parental stress in mothers of intervention group in all three domains of parental disturbance, dysfunctional parent-child interaction and difficult child had significant decrease. According to the components of attachment-based intervention, it can be concluded that increasing maternal sensitivity and improving the pattern of mother-child relationship, increasing the sense of maternal competence in solving problems and their parental role, reduce parental stress in mothers.