The Effectiveness of Group Art Therapy on Coping with Divorce in 9 to 12 Years Old Girls of Divorced Parents

Family plays an important role in children's and society's mental health. Family is always exposed to many harms, one of which is divorce. Divorce can affect children and make them vulnerable to physical, mental, and social health problems, personality disorders, malnutrition, physical illness, and delinquent behaviors. Art therapy is one of these intervention methods to increase children's adaptation to parental divorce. Art therapy is a field that emerged from two areas of psychology and visual arts. Today, the divorce rate is increasing worldwide; the same trend can be seen in Iran. The rise in the divorce rate shows increased social harm related to this phenomenon. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of group art therapy on adjustment to divorce among girls whose parents divorced.

The research method was quasi–experimental with a pretest–posttest and a 1–month follow–up design with a control group. The study population comprised all girls aged 9 to 12 years whose parents had been divorced for a minimum of 6 months and a maximum of 2 years in Khorramabad City, Iran. A sample of 22 volunteered girls with divorced parents referred to counseling centers under the supervision of the Welfare Organization was selected by a non–random sampling method and then randomly replaced into two control and experimental groups. The experimental group participated in group art therapy sessions (12 sessions), but the control group did not receive any treatment. The Children's Belief about Parental Divorce Scale (Kurdek and Berg, 1987) has been used to measure children's adjustment to parental divorce. Data analysis was performed using descriptive statistics (frequency, percentage, mean & standard deviation) and inferential statistics (repeated measures analysis of variance and Bonferroni post hoc test) in SPSS 24 at the significance level 0.05.

The results indicated a significant difference between the experimental and control groups in the subscales of adjustment to parental divorce (peer abandonment and avoidance, fear of abandonment, hope of return, paternal blame, maternal blame, and self–blame) and overall score (p<0.001). There was a significant difference between the mean score of the pretest in all subscales (except paternal blame) and the overall score of adjustment to divorce with the posttest and follow–up (p<0.05). But the posttest score was not significantly different from the follow–up, which shows the stability of the effectiveness of the art therapy intervention over time (p>0.05).

According to the findings, group art therapy is useful and effective in increasing adaptation to parental divorce in children.