The Effect of the Triple P-Positive Parenting Program on Children with Somatic Complaints

The presence of physical complaints of unknown etiology is a fairly common occurrence in pediatric populations and often interferes with school, home life, and peer relationships. There are potential relationships among parental illness, parental stress and particularly, negative parent-child relationships and dysfunctional parenting style and children's somatic complaints. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the triple p-positive parenting program on children with somatic complaints. This research is a semi-experimental design with pre-post test and control group. Eighteen mothers whose children had received scores above of cut-point (T=64) on somatic symptoms subtest of child behavioral checklist (CBCL) and their problems were also confirmed by the teacher report form (TRF) were selected and randomly allocated to the experimental (n=9) and control (n=9) groups. Experimental group received triple-p for 8 weeks, single a week sessions lasted two hours. Both groups of mothers were evaluated again by CBCL. Mean age of subjects in experimental group was 32.2±4.4 and in control group was 31.8±4.3 years. In control group, mean pre-test score was 3.8±0.8 and mean post-test score was 3.6±0.9. In experimental group, mean pre-test score and mean post-test score was 3.7±0.7 and 2.8±1.1, respectively. Also difference in score in control group was 0.2±0.4 that showed a significant difference (p<0.05). This research showed that the triple p-positive parenting program should be implemented for parents without considering their children's age and sex.