Health promotion with a single parents self-help group
type: CreativeWork
description: Single parenting has become very common today due to having a child illegitimately, death of spouse, separation, and high rate of divorce. Single parent families are subject to many forms of economic and psychological stress. For example, they result in the creation of non-custodial parents, whose contact with their children is often irregular and unrewarding. The quality of interpersonal relationships with others makes the difference in coping or not coping during the first five years of being a single parent. An organization of single parents (self-help group) provides a support system responsive to the special problems of single parents, including discussion groups, which are responsive to the inadequacies in the ongoing lives of single parents, in promoting mental health. Self-help groups fall within the social action model of community psychology which aims to promote personal empowerment defined as the process of gaining influence over events and outcomes of importance to an individual or group. This model is a shift in intervention from prevention to empowerment and from needs to rights. The present research has been motivated by the World Health Organisation's 'target for all* document and the Ottawa Charter for action to achieve health for all by the year 2000 (presented at the first international conference on health promotion in November 1986). It has also been a motivation to note a commitment and emerging progress by health professionals and psychologists in mounting an array of health promotion and prevention programs. The aims of the study were to elicit needs from a group of single parents, form and evaluate an ongoing self-help group program and promote the following variables: psychological health, empowerment andparent effectiveness. It was hypothesized that the self-help group program for single parents will result in improvement of the mentioned variables. The researcher called for volunteers to join the group. Eight single parents committed the…
abstract: Single parenting has become very common today due to having a child illegitimately, death of spouse, separation, and high rate of divorce. Single parent families are subject to many forms of economic and psychological stress. For example, they result in the creation of non-custodial parents, whose contact with their children is often irregular and unrewarding. The quality of interpersonal relationships with others makes the difference in coping or not coping during the first five years of being a single parent. An organization of single parents (self-help group) provides a support system responsive to the special problems of single parents, including discussion groups, which are responsive to the inadequacies in the ongoing lives of single parents, in promoting mental health. Self-help groups fall within the social action model of community psychology which aims to promote personal empowerment defined as the process of gaining influence over events and outcomes of importance to an individual or group. This model is a shift in intervention from prevention to empowerment and from needs to rights. The present research has been motivated by the World Health Organisation's 'target for all* document and the Ottawa Charter for action to achieve health for all by the year 2000 (presented at the first international conference on health promotion in November 1986). It has also been a motivation to note a commitment and emerging progress by health professionals and psychologists in mounting an array of health promotion and prevention programs. The aims of the study were to elicit needs from a group of single parents, form and evaluate an ongoing self-help group program and promote the following variables: psychological health, empowerment andparent effectiveness. It was hypothesized that the self-help group program for single parents will result in improvement of the mentioned variables. The researcher called for volunteers to join the group. Eight single parents committed the…
author: Dhlomo, Rosemond Mbaliyezwe.
keywords: Single parents self-help
license: https://devspace.unizulu.ac.za/bitstreams/f5be0345-0c82-4956-a635-d8f6d12803b1/download
date published: 2000
date modified: 2026-07-24T06:17:06Z
provider: University of Zululand
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Zululand