AOCCN2017

Presentation information

Poster Presentation

[P3-147~204] Poster Presentation 3

Sat. May 13, 2017 10:00 AM - 3:40 PM Poster Room B (1F Argos F)

[P3-171] Results of Group Psychotherapy for Parents Seeking Help Primarily for Children’s Aggression

Miyuki USHIDA (Department of Child and Adolescent Psychosomatic Medicine, NHO Shikoku Medical Center for Children and Adults, Japan)

[Introduction]
We see many cases on children with aggressions with overly demanding parents. These children are generally in a state of lowered tolerance for stress and their parents’ demands get higher as they lose their confidences.
We conducted a group psychotherapy for this particular issue. We assessed the results using the CBCL (Child Behaviour Checklist) scores as an index.
[Subjects]
We addressed 34 cases in which parents complained primarily about their children’s extreme temper tantrums and violent acting out. Their children’s ages ranged from 4 to 18 years of age (average age 9.4 years). There are 7 preschoolers, 22 school children, 3 junior high school students and 2 high school students (24 males and 10 females).
[Methodology]
The structure of this program involved 1) patients only, 2) time-limited group psychotherapy, 3) parent-child relationship focused approach, 4) supporting parents by giving clear instructions, 5) modifying parent’s behaviour in order to modify parent-child relationship, and 6) creating a situation in which the child’s natural instinct to be ‘a child’ could be expressed ‘without a conflict’ by stopping parent to display aggression toward their child.
[Results]
Average of CBCL scores exhibited a clear improvement as pre-therapy shows 61.9 (22-98) and post-therapy shows 29.5 (1-72).
In all cases, children stopped their violent acts and most parents started to see their child endearing again.
Parenting intervention is not easy but we found that if we intervened when parent is motivated enough, there will be a group of patients exhibiting high-level results as we expected.