Enhancing the Impact of Parent Training Through Narrative Restructuring

ABSTRACT

New analyses of archival data from a parent training study are presented for ten troubled mother-child dyads. All the mothers participated in verbal discourse sessions with their clinicians during the same weeks in which they participated in clinic-based parent training. The discourse was guided by clinicians to focus mothers on their narratives of parenting problems; five mothers were prompted to restructure their stories in order to improve story coherence, while the other five were simply prompted to continue their stories. All stories were rated for clarity and credibility and mother-child interactions were measured in the dyads' home settings. Results show that the restructuring process led these mothers to tell more credible stories than did the control group mothers. Home observations also showed that the former group followed the parent training protocol, while the latter group did not. In addition, correlations between mothers' narrative credibility scores and home indices of mother-child improvement suggest that the narrative restructuring procedure might have enhanced mothers' parent training performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Parent training
• parent narratives restructuring