NAVER 학술정보

초록

The purpose of this study was to improve emotional intelligence of parents having difficulty in parenting due to their children's problem behavior. The improvement in emotional intelligence enables parents to perceive, think of, use, and regulate their emotions with ease when emotions as well as the self-understanding of their own emotions and behaviors are activated; here, sandtray play can be applied effectively. Two studies were conducted to develop and validate a sand-tray play parent education program based on emotional intelligence with the objective of improving parents' emotional intelligence.
Study 1 was conducted in two stages to develop a sand-tray play parent education program based on emotional intelligence. First, research was conducted in 255 parents of children at nurseries and kindergartens in D City to identify their needs with the aim of developing a sandtray play parent education program based on emotional intelligence. The results showed that the parents were highly aware of the effects of their emotional development on their role performance and their children's emotional development and that they had a great demand for parent education programs based on lectures, experience, and activity to regulate their own emotions. Second, on the basis of the results of literature review and the research on parents' needs, a 10-session program was developed, including such phases as lectures regarding emotional intelligence and parenting skills, instructed sandtray play for presenting emotion-related themes, and sharing emotions from the lectures and sandtray play, by applying the components of emotional intelligence, as suggested by Salovery and Mayea (1997), and the therapeutic factors for sandtray play.
In Study 2, 16 parents of three- to six-year-old children who scored ≤180 for parents' emotional intelligence and ≤116 for their children's emotional intelligence and had the T score of ≥60 for the upper factors for problem behavior in their young children's behavior inventory and of ≥65 for the lower factors were divided into the experimental (N=8) and control groups (N=8) to determine the effectiveness of the sand-tray play parent education program based on emotional intelligence. The experimental group was divided into two sub-groups (N=4) to run the parent education program in a total of 10 sessions―2 sessions a week. Parents' emotional intelligence and parenting inventories and young children's emotional intelligence and behavior inventories were used in pretest, in posttest, and in follow-up and the data were processed by using SPSS 20 to perform repeated measure ANOVA. The verbal responses related to parents' emotional intelligence were analyzed within each session on the basis of the components of emotional intelligence and parents' parenting attitudes were qualitatively analyzed on the basis of the guidelines for evaluating parent-child interaction in the pretest, in the posttest, and in the follow-up.
The program had the following effects: First, the sand-tray play parent education program based on emotional intelligence was effective in improving emotional intelligence of the parents in the experimental group. Parents' emotional awareness and expression, empathy, emotional thinking promotion, emotional utilization, emotional regulation, and emotional intelligence in general were improved. The verbal responses related to emotional intelligence, including expression of understanding parents' own and their children's emotions and needs and strategies for emotional regulation, were found in each session. Second, it was effective in changing parenting attitudes of the parents in the experimental group. Parents' supportive expression, rational explanation, punishment, interference, and inconsistency went through positive changes. The assessment of parent-child interaction showed that the parents were more likely to be sensitive to their children's emotions, be affectionate to them, and structure the environment in which their children could perform tasks in the posttest and follow-up than in the pretest. Third, it was effective in improving emotional intelligence of the children in the experimental group. The children's self-awareness, self-regulation, other-awareness, other-regulation, and emotional intelligence in general were improved. Fourth, it was effective in reducing problem behaviors of the children in the experimental group. Internalization, externalization, and problem behavior in general decreased.
This study is significant in that it developed a parent education program, focusing on improvement in parents' emotional intelligence, which was relatively less likely to attract attention, as a means of reducing young children's problem behavior; it developed an experience-based parent education program by which parents could personally experience, understand, and apply emotions to daily life rather than a parent education program for delivering contents; and it confirmed usability of sandtray play in improving parents' emotional intelligence. While the program in this study positively affected the dependent variables, the relations among the dependent variables were unclear; therefore, further research should be conducted on the correlations among the dependent variables and on the parameters for the effects of parents' emotional intelligence on their young children's emotional intelligence and problem behavior.



Key words: Young child's problem behavior, emotional intelligence, parenting attitude, parent education program based on sandtray play