Compassionate love parenting training to reduce stress in caregivers of children with special needs: An experimental study

Dinie Ratri Desiningrum*    -  Department of Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Universitas Diponegoro, Semarang, Indonesia
Donna Hermawati  -  Department of Medical Biology and Biochemistry, Faculty of Medicine, Universitas Diponegoro, Semarang, Indonesia
Maman Somantri  -  Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Diponegoro, Semarang, Indonesia
Yeniar Indriana    -  Department of Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Universitas Diponegoro, Semarang, Indonesia
Alhimna Rusydana  -  Department of Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Universitas Diponegoro, Semarang, Indonesia

(*) Corresponding Author
DOI: 10.21580/pjpp.v8i1.14931
Caregivers of children with special needs experience a high workload, which causes stress and low quality of life. A compassionate love attitude amongst caregivers is needed to improve the quality of parenting. This study aims to develop a compassionate love parenting training program to reduce stress among children with special needs caregivers. The method employed was Pre-experimental Design, with One-group Pre-test-Post-test. The research participants were 40 care­givers identified using the purposive sampling technique. In the pre-test, the stress level of the caregivers was measured using the Parental Stress Scale with 24 items (α = .828). The data were analyzed using the Wilcoxon test to observe the differences between the pre-test and post-test of two dependent samples. The results show that the stress score decreased significantly, with Z = -2.023 and with a significance level of .043 < .05. It is demonstrated that regular training in compassionate love parenting reduced the stress felt by caregivers of children with special needs. The implementation of compassionate love parenting training in special needs therapeutic centers is important, as it is one of the intervention methods that has been proven to reduce the level of stress to optimize the growth of the child.

Keywords: caregiver; compassionate love training; parenting stress; special needs children

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