The Effectiveness of Online Life Skills Training in Parent-Adolescent Conflicts and Adolescents’ Academic Procrastination during the Outbreak of Covid-19

COVID-19 is becoming one of the biggest threats and challenges to global public health. The objective of the present study was to investigate the effectiveness of online life skills training for the parent-adolescent conflicts and adolescents’ academic procrastination during COVID-19 period.

This is a quasi-experimental study with pretest-posttest design with a control group. Thirty students were selected based on multi-stage cluster and were randomly assigned to the experimental (15 students) and the control (15 students) groups. They filled out Straus’ Parent-Adolescent Conflict questionnaire and Solomon and Rothblum’s Academic Procrastination questionnaire. The participants in the experimental group received 10 online 60 minute sessions of life skills training, and the control group did not receive any intervention. Data analysis was performed using analysis of covariance at a significance level of α = 0.05.

The results of data analysis showed that online life skills training during COVID-19 outbreak significantly reduced parent-child conflict, the components of reasoning, verbal aggression, physical aggression, and academic procrastination including the components of preparing for exams, preparing for homework, and preparing for classroom research (P ˂ 0.05). The effect size showed that the effect of online life skills training on parent-adolescent conflict was more effective than that of academic procrastination.

Due to the effectiveness of online life skills in reducing parent-adolescent conflicts and academic procrastination, the use of this method is recommended to psychologists and family counselors.