Desenvolvimento e avaliação de um programa de habilidades sociais com mães de crianças defeicientes visuais.

Abstract

Studies on visually disabled children have emphasized the relevant role of parents in their overall motor, cognitive, and social-affective development. Likewise, studies indicate that parents behavior like fear, insecurity, overprotection, and deficient social performances may interfere negatively in the learning of social repertoires necessary for the children's interactions with their peers and with other adults who are significant in their lives. Thus, it is possible that in teaching or perfecting the parents social skills to plan and conduct skillful pertinent educational practices to the children s needs, they may become able to promote the development and learning benefiting the visually disabled child towards a satisfactory social performance living autonomy. The present research aimed at evaluating social deficits and skills of visually disabled children, evaluating their mothers social-educational deficits and skills, planning and implementing a program to train the mothers social educational skills, in order to promote the children s social skills and to evaluate with the mothers the effects of such program on the children s social performance. To realize these goals, a group quasi-experimental design was adopted: 50 children and their respective mothers were subdivided into three groups. The first group was identified as EG (experimental group) and was composed by 9 visually disabled children, whose mothers underwent the training program; the second, CG1 (control group with 14 visually disabled children); and the third, CG2 (control group with 27 seeing children). The evaluation of the children s social repertoire was carried out by the mothers, the teachers, and the children themselves, both in the pre and post intervention phases (for EG, CG1, and CG2), and also in the follow-up phase (for EG), three months after the end of the program, using the Social Skills Rating System (SSRS). The repertoire of the mothers social skills was evaluated by means of IHS-Del-Prette, and the repertoire of social educational skills was evaluated by means of a questionnaire and the filming of play sessions between mother and child in the pre and post phases as well as in the follow-up phase. The results of such evaluations were dealt with and computerized either in terms of frequency or of total and factorial scores. For all measures available, pre and post interventional comparisons (Wilcoxon) were realized, as well as pre, post, and follow-up comparisons (Friedman followed by a multiple comparison test for k related samples), and comparisons between the different groups and the different informants (Kruskal-Wallis followed by a multiple comparison test for k independent samples). The results indicate that the visually disabled children s social performance was more deficient than that of the seeing children in several of the evaluated social skills; they also indicate that such performance differences either decreased or were overcome when the mothers were trained in social educational skills of reading the environment, creating a motivating context for learning, showing the consequences of the child s behavior, expressing feelings, providing feedback, and promoting the generalization of the behaviors learnt, that way favoring the promotion of their children s social skills.