Effectiveness of Mothers' Psychological Empowerment Package on Children’s Social Skills and Mother’s Empathy: A Pilot Study

Childhood is one of the most basic periods of life. Meanwhile, the pre-primary period is considered the key years for children's mental and physical development. Education of parents, especially mothers of children under the age of six, has recently attracted the attention of planners in the field of children due to the positive changes it creates in children. This research was conducted with the aim of determining the effectiveness of the psychological empowerment of mothers on children's social skills and mother's empathy.

This semi-interventional study, pre-test-post-test and two-month follow-up, was conducted with the participation of thirty mothers with children aged 4 to 6 years in Isfahan city in 2021. The participants were selected in the available way and randomly replaced in two equal intervention and control groups. The intervention group received the mother's psychological empowerment package for 10 sessions of 90 minutes, and the control group did not receive any intervention. The participants of both groups completed the questionnaires of Mattson's Child's social skills and Davis's mother's empathy before and after intervention and two months later as a follow-up. Data were analyzed using variance analysis with repeated measurements test and SPSS Statistics for Windows, version 23.0 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, Ill., USA).

The mean (SD) score of the child’s social skills in the pre-test was 190.8 (22.4), which increased to 210.0 (12.9) in the post-test and 204.1 (14.3) in the follow-up (P<0.001). The mean (SD) score of the mother's empathy in the pre-test was 46.9 (8.5), which increased to 54.0 (7.9) in the post-test and 55.7 (7.2) in the follow-up (P<0.001). No significant change was observed in the control group.

The study showed that teaching psychological empowerment packages to mothers with children aged 4 to 6 years increased the child’s social skills and mother's empathy.