The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of mothers’ parenting efficacy and children’s social and emotional competence of multi- cultural families in rural areas.
The subjects of this study were 12 children (ages 3 to 7) and their 12 mothers of multi-cultural families in rural areas. They were randomly assigned to the experimental group or the control group with six pairs of mothers and children.
The mother-child filial therapy program had been applied to the experimental group exclusively for 4 hours every Monday over 5 weeks. After 4 weeks, the effect of the program was measured by comparing pretest scores and post-test scores. Mann-Whitney U-test, nonparametric test was used to determine homogeneity between the experimental group and the control group before the program using SPSS 21.0. Another nonparametric test, Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-rank test was used to see the effects of the program comparing the pretest scores of the experimental group and the control group with the post-test scores of two groups respectively.
The results of this study are as follows.
First, the filial therapy program has the partial significant effect on mothers’ parenting efficacy of multi-cultural families in rural areas. Especially the sub-factor of parenting efficacy, mothers’ sense of parenting competence was increased significantly after the program.
Second, the filial therapy program also has the significant effect partially on the children’ social and emotional competence in the family. One of the sub-factor of children’ social and emotional competence, externalizing behavior problems was decreased after the filial therapy program.
Third, filial therapy program also has the significant effect partially on the children’s social and emotional competence in the preschool. Comparing with the level of prosocial behavior of the pretest, the level of prosocial behavior of the post-test was improved significantly after the filial therapy program. And the level of externalizing behavior problems of the post-test was decreased significantly comparing with the level of pretest after the filial therapy program.

In conclusion, these results show that the filial therapy program has very positive effect on the mothers’ parenting efficacy and the children’s social and emotional competence of multi-cultural families.