This study is to investigate if and how family art therapy can help a truant child and
the parents overcome separation anxiety, enhance family relations, and improve truant
behavior. This girl had already been absent from school for the last four days, having said
that she saw ghosts to show considerable anxiety and insist truancy. The causes of her
truancy seems to arise from her fear for her teacher at school and from frequent fights of
her parents, which in turn causes family discord to make her feel unstable attachment and
separation anxiety on her mother.
The therapy program lasted from April-26-2004 through July-12-2004, with total 20
sessions, twice a week. Research tools for the truant child are KSD(Kinetic School
Drawing), KFD(Kinetic Family Drawing), and Beck's Anxiety Inventory; while research
tools for the parents include Marital Satisfaction Scale(MSS); and sessional analysis of
drawings by family and their behavior.
The results obtained are as follows.
First, it is shown that family art therapy is effective to promote satisfaction in marital
life. In the MSS, father scored 3.31 in the post-test up-scaled from the score of 2.73 in the
pre-test; while mother scored 3.73 in the post-test increased from 2.23 in the pre-test.
Thus the family has become emotionally stable and the girl has improved her truancy.
Second, family art therapy is shown to be effective to reduce the anxiety level of a
truant child, whose truancy is caused by separation anxiety. The child's anxiety index in
the pre-test is 3.71 out of total 4 points. Whereas the anxiety index in the post-test is 2.67.
Third, the girl in the pre-test of KSD showed the teacher's angry face and her hands
flogged, but she exhibited in the post-test of KSD that she played with friends showing
some positive changes.
Thus, family art therapy is proved to be effective to stabilize emotions of parents and the
family, and reduce the truant girls' anxiety level so as to better adapt to school.
Key Words : Truancy, Family Art Therapy, Separation Anxiety, Marital Satisfaction