Positive Parenting Training on Decrease Anxiety and Aggression in Children with Thalassemia

Thalassemia is one of the global health problems and the most common hereditary anemia in the world. Thalassemia can have many adverse effects on the patient, family and community. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the solution to improve the quality of life of these patients. Positive parenting program is one of the most effective interventions on parenting styles and parenting communication with children, which planed and developed by Sanders et al. This program is established based on the principles of social learning and prepare parents to better deal with their children and researchers used it to study and improve the parent–child relationship. Even it had an appropriate impact on the relation of children with intellectual disabilities with their mothers. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of teaching a positive parenting program on reducing the anxiety and aggression of children with thalassemia in terms of drug control in Shiraz, Iran.

The research design was a quasi–experimental design with experimental group and control group and it evaluated by pre–test, intervention and post–test. The statistical population consisted of all children aged 8–15 years old with thalassemia who referred to Shahid Dastgheib Hospital in Shiraz (Fars province, South of Iran) in 2014–15. The statistical sample was 32 children who were randomly assigned to two experimental groups (n=16) and a control group (n=16). To measure the desired variables, such as anxiety, screening test was used to emotional disturbances associated with childhood anxiety; Scard questionnaire (1997) and Nelson's anger inventory (2000) were used to measure aggression. In order to conduct the research plan, the parents of the experimental group were under the eight sessions of the positive parenting program (every week one session). At the end of the sessions, pre–test was taken from the subjects. The subjects were subjected to post–test. Data were analyzed using independent t–test and dependent t–test and covariance analysis using SPSS 22 software.

The results of covariance analysis showed that 8 sessions of positive parenting program reduced children's anxiety (p≤0.001) and children's aggression (p≤0.001) with thalassemia. Independent t–test showed that there was no significant difference in children's anxiety in the pre–test between the experimental and control groups but there was a significant difference between the experimental and control groups in the post–test (p<0.001). In addition, there was no significant difference in the aggression of children in the pre–test between the experimental and control groups. However, there was a significant difference between the experimental and control groups in the post–test (p=0.006). Results of t–test showed that there was a significant difference in children's anxiety between pre–test and post–test in the experimental group (p<0.001), but there was no significant difference between pre–test and post–test in the control group. In addition, here was a significant difference in children's aggression between pre–test and post–test in experimental group (p<0.001), but there was no significant difference between pre–test and post–test in control group.

According to the results of this study, it could be stated that 8 sessions of positive parenting program could reduce children's anxiety and the incidence of aggression in children with thalassemia. Furthermore, teaching a positive parenting program to mothers of children with thalassemia can have a positive effect on decreasing the anxiety and aggression of these children. Therefore, positive parenting program can be used as an effective treatment for the treatment of anxiety and aggression in children with Thalassemia.