Single Parent Participating in Art Therapy Guidance Curriculum Intention

Abstract

With the rapid social progress, medical development, improved national education standards, and family structure that had changed from the traditional extended family into nuclear or smaller families, and other social factors, it was found that the number of preschool children living in single-parent families are gradually increasing; many of these single parent children live with their father or mother because of the divorced. Similar to adults, children also need to face the changes in their surroundings and learn to adjust to their living paths to adapt to the changing future. When children find it difficult to adapt to the environment or to overcome adversity, negative emotions. During the process of drawing, young children might express themselves naturally, while learning drawing methods and getting along with everyone happily Family Counseling Center (FCC) provide programs can help single parent to motivate children’s positive behaviors through different life learning philosophies with professional knowledge from different fields. Besides learning self-introspection, single parent can also apply what they have learned to help children with different family issues. This study adopted the Theory of Planed Behavior (TPB) (Ajzen, 1985; 1991) as the theoretical foundation. The reason was because the TPB can create better models to predict more complex and particular behavior patterns than general behavioral theories can. It can decompose belief into several constructs to help understand which factors had greater influences on behavioral intention. Thus the research subjects were single parents who had participated in the 5 preschool Family Counseling Center workshops in July of 2019. The questionnaire was designed to examine preschool single parent’s intention to participate in art therapy professional single parent guidance curriculums. A total of 200 questionnaires were distributed to the 5 FCC workshops in Taiwan. Regarding signal parent participation in art therapy professional single parent guidance curriculums, “attitude”, “subjective norms”, and “perceived behavioral control” were significantly related to “intention to participate in art therapy single parent guidance curriculums”. The result of the study shows that the more positive single parent attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control regarding participation in art therapy single parent guidance curriculums were, the higher their intentions to participate were. In other words, their intentions were related to other people’s viewpoints and their perception of degrees of controlling. However, perceived behavioral control and attitude were factors which significantly influenced single parent’s participation in art therapy single parent guidance curriculums.