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Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Parent Training Program on Adolescent Mothers and Their Communicative Interactions with Their Children

The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the Tips About Talk parent-training classes for increasing adolescent mothers knowledge about their childrens speech and language development and the quality of mothers interactions with their children. Seven mother-child dyads served as participants. All of the participating mothers were single, African American, and enrolled in a GED program. The mean age of the mothers was 20.57 years, and their mean educational level was 9.29 years. Their children were between the ages of 24 and 67 months.
The experimental treatment involved four Tips About Talk parent-training workshops. The control treatment was four nutrition parent-training workshops. Both treatments were administered in a group setting. The dependent measures, a questionnaire and a mother-child language sample, were collected prior to the first workshop and following the final workshop. The 30-item questionnaire asked the mothers to rank their knowledge of child speech and language and their use of positive talking strategies on a six-point Likert scale.
At post-test but not at pre, the mothers in the experimental group provided significantly higher ratings for the speech and language questions than those in the control group. At post-test, the experimental group also produced fewer word tokens and a reduced rate of prohibitions than did the control group. In addition, a trend of decreased MLU was noted at post-testing for the experimental group. No significant differences were found at post-test between the experimental and control groups for the use of behaviors that are known to facilitate childrens preliteracy skills. The results of the current study suggest that group-based parent-training can influence the knowledge and behaviors of teen mothers in a positive way.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-0417102-170452
Date29 April 2002
CreatorsPruitt, Sonja Lee
ContributorsJanna Oetting, Jan Norris, Paul Hoffman
PublisherLSU
Source SetsLouisiana State University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-0417102-170452/
Rightsunrestricted, I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University Libraries in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation.

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