The Effects of "Mother Education Program" on Mothers' Parenting Knowledge, Parenting Self-Efficacy and Their Children's Development

Abstract

The aim of this study is to examine the effect of the “Mother Education Program” on parenting knowledge and task self-efficacy of mothers with 24-36-month-old children and their children’s social-personal, language, fine motor, and gross motor development. This study employs a mixed model, and it is in intervention design. The study group was composed of 22 mothers and their children 11 of whom were included in the experimental group and 11 of whom were included in the control group. As a result, it was found that the mother education program applied for 12 weeks caused significant differences in mothers’ scores for parenting tasks, their scores on the Knowledge of Effective Parenting scale, and their scores in the nurturance, discipline, and play subscales of the Self-Efficacy for Parenting Tasks scale. It was determined that there was a significant difference between the pretest-posttest mean scores of children in the experimental and control groups regarding personal-social, fine motor, language, and gross motor development subscales of the Denver Developmental Screening Test. Mothers’ views on the contributions of the program mostly fell into categories of ‘contributions to mothers’ and ‘contributions to children’. As a result of the study, it was found that the mother education program offered to the mothers contributed to the mothers' knowledge of effective parenting and to their self-efficacy in parenting in addition to contributing to their children’s development.