Dissertation
THE IMPACT OF A PARENT EDUCATION PROGRAM FOR HELPING MOTHERS HELP THEIR CHILDREN COPE WITH STRESS ON CHILDREN’S COPING AND ADJUSTMENT
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2020
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/111415
Abstract
Latino children and youth from low-income backgrounds express more stress, depression, anxiety, and delinquency than white, European American children and youth. Children must learn strategies to deal with and cope with stress in their lives. Parents play an essential role in children’s lives and in their ability to help their children deal with stressful situations. There is a need for programs that focus on Latino parents to help parents find ways that they can help their children cope with stress. A multi-site randomized controlled trial with pre, post, and 3-month follow-up assessments was conducted to evaluate the impact of a program to help Latina mothers help their children cope with stress. Mothers in the intervention group participated in a seven-week program to learn to help their children cope with stress and deal with difficult situations. The program focused on assisting mothers to learn appropriate strategies to manage controllable and uncontrollable stressors, to recognize when children are stressed, to coach their children on coping, to understand difficult emotions, and to improve communication with their children. MANCOVAs were used to examine the impact of the program on: 1) mothers’ emotion coaching, parental self-efficacy, coping knowledge, and scaffolding of their children’s responses to stress; and 2) children’s coping with difficult situations and behavior problems. Mothers in the intervention group, compared to the controls, showed significant increases from pre-test to post-test in emotion coaching, in their knowledge of strategies to help their children cope, in maternal scaffolding strategies to effectively support child coping, and in their self-efficacy regarding helping their children cope with stress. Intervention mothers also showed significant decreases in their ratings of children’s behavior problems. Children whose mothers had taken the program reported less emotional problems and increased their use of primary control engagement in one of two situations studied. The findings show that the program had an impact on mother’s ability to help their children cope with stressful situations and to empower them to have more communication about feelings with their children. Latina mothers can greatly benefit from evidence-based programs that help them learn strategies to improve their children’s socioemotional development.
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Details
- Title
- THE IMPACT OF A PARENT EDUCATION PROGRAM FOR HELPING MOTHERS HELP THEIR CHILDREN COPE WITH STRESS ON CHILDREN’S COPING AND ADJUSTMENT
- Creators
- Karina Silva Garcia
- Contributors
- Thomas Power (Advisor)Louise Parker (Advisor)Louise Parker (Committee Member)Thomas Power (Committee Member)Brenda Barrio (Committee Member)Yoshie Sano (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Human Development, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 129
- Identifiers
- 99900581499901842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation