ABSTRACT
Parent counseling and parent education procedures are gaining popularity as interventive and preventive mental health strategies. Parents of retarded children represent one population for which counseling procedures may be extremely important. Parents of these children are under a great deal of situational stress and often have difficulty with day-to-day child management issues. Multiple success criteria were used to provide a broad-based measurement of outcome of counseling. It was predicted that all parents who received counseling, either behavioral or reflective, would show significant improvement across outcome indices relative to comparable untreated parents. It was predicted that counseled parents would show positive change in their attitudes; report fewer behavioral problems; increase the positive quality of the mother-child interaction; and report an improvement in the quality of family life.
