The purpose of this study was to examine how much group art therapy could contribute
to improving the mother-child self-esteem of single-parents families and their perception of
family relations.
The subjects in this study were 16 people who resided at J single- parent family center.
They included 8 mothers and their children, and an experimental group and a control group
were randomly organized with four mother-child pairs each. An intrasubject-intersubject
variable research design was employed, and among independent variables, group
(experimental and control groups) was selected as the intersubject variable, and the testing
time(pretest and posttest) was chosen as the intrasubject variable. The experiment was
conducted in a counseling room of J single-parent family center from August 26 through
November 4, 2003. The group art therapy was provided in 20 sessions, twice a week. The
mother group and child group participated separately in the group art therapy program in
the first to eighth sessions for 90 and 50 minutes respectively. In the ninth to 20th session,
both groups took part in that together, 90 minutes each. To identify the effect of the
therapy, the participants were tested with self-esteem scale, parent-child relationship
satisfaction scale and mother representation- perception scale four days before and after the
experiment respectively, and kinetic family drawing was attempted at the same time.
The results obtained are as follows:
First, The group art therapy had a positive effect on self-esteem of the mothers and their children.
Second, The group art therapy had positive effect on their perception of mother-child relationship.
Key Words : Group art therapy, Single-parents families, Self-esteem, Perception of mother-child relationship