The Role of Child Rearing Training Skills in Reducing Mother's Stress and Children's Behavioral Problems

the present research examined the efficacy of paren- ting skills training in preventing stress in a non-cli- nical sample of mothers, and in reducing behavioral prob- lems among children of those mothers. The Parenting Stress Index (PSI; Abidin, 1990) was administered to a sample of 198 mothers. 51 of those mothers who scored highest in PSI were chosen and randomly assigned to two experi- mental (N = 26) and control (N = 25) groups, and com- pleted the Child Behavioral Checklist (Achenbach, 2001). Quanti- tative data were analyzed using pretest-posttest (t- test), correlation coefficient, and multiple covariance ana- lyses. Results indicated that after intervention: a) mothers in the experimental group showed lower level of stress, as compared to mothers in control group, b) children of mo- thers in experimental group showed less behavioral pro- blems than children of mothers in the control group.