ABSTRACT The paper investigates the effect of brief early intervention on parental stress in the midst of a socio-economic crisis, such as the one that struck Greece in the past decade. During this period, a psychoanalytically oriented prevention programme with parents and their infants/young children, named ‘Early Intervention Programme’, was designed and implemented in the Department of Child Psychiatry at ‘Aghia Sophia’ Children’s Hospital in Athens, Greece. The families that attended the programme were asked to participate in a research study regarding its effectiveness; data were collected from 102 mothers and 73 fathers. This paper presents the statistical findings regarding parental stress, mainly because it is a factor that has systematically been shown to negatively influence several aspects of a child’s development, but also because our hypothesis was that parental stress would be influenced by the negative external conditions. The results showed that both mothers’ and fathers’ stress levels were high before their participation to the programme (with fathers’ Total Stress scores falling within the clinical range), while they decreased to a statistically significant level after the completion of the programme. These findings are discussed in conjunction with some illustrative clinical material. Based on these, it is argued that the implementation of a psychoanalytically oriented brief early intervention programme with parents and infants/young children can alleviate parental stress, and thus support the parental capacity to efficiently deal with the high demands of early development, even in periods of economic crisis where the tensions for young parents are significant and the available mental health resources are scarce.

中文翻译：

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在社会经济危机时期实施简短的早期干预：对父母压力的影响

摘要 本文研究了在社会经济危机（例如过去十年袭击希腊的危机）中短暂的早期干预对父母压力的影响。在此期间，希腊雅典“Aghia Sophia”儿童医院的儿童精神病科设计并实施了一项名为“早期干预计划”的面向父母及其婴儿/幼儿的心理分析预防计划。参加该计划的家庭被要求参与一项有关其有效性的研究；数据来自102位母亲和73位父亲。本文介绍了有关父母压力的统计结果，主要是因为它是一个已被系统证明对儿童发展的多个方面产生负面影响的因素，也因为我们的假设是父母的压力会受到负面外部条件的影响。结果显示，母亲和父亲在参与该计划之前的压力水平都很高（父亲的总压力得分在临床范围内），而在完成该计划后，他们下降到具有统计学意义的水平。这些发现将结合一些说明性的临床材料进行讨论。基于这些，有人认为，与父母和婴儿/幼儿一起实施以精神分析为导向的简短早期干预计划可以减轻父母的压力，从而支持父母有效应对早期发展的高要求的能力，