Impact of parent training on behavior of children with conduct disorder

Abstract

Abstract Children's conduct issues are a widespread mental health concern. CD is strongly linked to adult illegal violence, drug misuse, failure of school, adolescent pregnancy and unemployment and so on. This issue is exacerbated in impoverished and working-class nations where mental health treatments for children are severely lacking. Early identification and treatment of Conduct Disorder can help adults avoid negative psychosocial repercussions later in life. In light of this, the current study aims to assist parents by teaching them effective communication with their children and providing intermittent recommendations for parental self-care so that everyone is benefitted. The present study was carried out to see the parent‟s training impact on behavior of children who are diagnosed with conduct disorder. There were five goals of the study. The first aim was to develop a parent training program which was based on the parental needs whose children are identified with conduct disorder. Secondly investigating in what extent parent training is functional on children‟s behavior who are diagnosed with conduct disorder. Third objective was to modify children‟s disruptive behavior. Fourth objective was to assess the changes in distress level of the parents of children who are diagnosed with conduct disordered resulted from the training program. And finally, the fifth objective was to improve parenting practices. Parent training manual was developed through systematic review of available worldwide parent training with evidence, discussion with professionals. Initially a seven sessions manual was developed which was later reduced to five session come-after judge evaluation and pilot study. A total of 16 children with conduct disorder‟s parents were engaged in this study. The reason behind the participants of choosing to drop out of the study in different phases as they expressed when contacted were mainly due to fixed date and time of the hospitals in which all the training and conduction went on and their inconvenient location to take part in the training and the educational qualification of the parents as well. One group pre-test/post-test design was selected as a design to see the impact of parent training on behavior of children with conduct disorder. All measures that were used in this study were administered in the pre-test phase and all measures in the post-test phase were re-administered and after this, one- month follow-up was taken from the same groups to see the effectiveness of this training. To see the conditions of dependent variables, appropriate statistical analyses were used to compare pre-test/post-test scores. The severity of conduct disorder in children, fell significantly (Mean Difference = 28.81, p < 0.001) after the training, and continued to decline one-month later (Mean Difference = 11.63, p< 0.001). This training played an important role on reducing the conduct disorder severity in children. The results showed that the parents reported decreased in stress considerably after the training compared to the baseline assessment (Mean Difference = 7.25, p< 0.001) and remained stable (Mean Difference = 1.38, p> 0.05) after one month during the follow-up evaluation. Parenting practice among the participants increased significantly following the training (Mean Difference = 27.88, p < 0.001) and continued to increase one-month later (Mean Difference = 9.32, p < 0.05) compared to baseline evaluation. Main focus of the training module was to teach parents about how to better parenting their children who have conduct disorder. These parenting skills might have contributed enormously in this case. The findings of the study indicated the parent training is effectful on behavior of children with conduct disorder if they can be trained properly.