Effectiveness of an Intervention Program to Improve Parent-Adolescent Relationships

Parent education has expanded in recent decades as one of the effective intervention strategies and different programs in this field have been designed and implemented. The purpose of most of these programs is to increase the role of parents and improve parent-child relationship. The purpose of the present study is to examine the effectiveness of educational strategies to improve the relationship between parents and their adolescents. The present study is a quasi-experimental design with single group with pre-posttests design. Sample included 65 parents of preschool and primary school students from private schools in Tehran. These parents participated in a briefing held by the officials of the workshops and the objectives as well as the topics were introduced to them. Finally, parents who tended to participate in the workshops were enrolled. In each workshop, experienced and trained instructors taught strategies to improve the relationships of parents and adolescents. Workshops were held once a week in 5 sessions, each for 2 hours. Effectiveness of these workshops was evaluated by using Baumrind's Parenting Style Scale and Parent-Child Relationship Inventory. Participants completed these instruments before any training and also after taking all of the training sessions of the workshops. Although findings of the current research suggest that training programs increase the average scores for some factors of parenting style and parent-child relationship, they were not statistically significant, except for the parenting satisfaction subscale of The Parent-Child Relationship Inventory. Overall results showed that the intervention program had minimal positive impact on parenting style and parent-child relationship. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.