PARENTS AS TEACHERS OF THEIR OWN LEARNING DISABLED CHILDREN

The aim of this research was to investigate parental belief systems and parental childrearing practices, relative to the intellectual development of the communication handicapped (CH) preschool child, embedded within the context of family size and ordinal position of the CH child. An equal number of families with a non‐handicaped (NCH) child served as a contrast group. The basic hypothesis underlying this research was that parental practices would be directly related to parents' beliefs about child development processes and about their own child's cognitive competence. These beliefs stem from at least two factors: First, experience as a child in a family; second, experience as a parent. The parent‐child relationship in this setting was viewed as interactional, where each parent acted as teacher, socializer and manager of the child's behavior. In this role, the parent also learned both from the CH child and NCH child in the family. Therein lay the interest in investigating the impact of the parent‐child relationship on parents and on CH children. Specifically, the study addressed four problems: (1) the relationship between parental belief systems regarding children's cognitive capabilities in general and with respect to their own CH child in particular, (2) the effect of the CH child's level of functioning and position in the family constellation on parental belief systems, (3) the relationship between these perspectives and actual parental teaching and management strategies, and (4) the effect of such teaching/management behaviors on the CH child's level of cognitive functioning and level of representational competence. Each of these segments was identified and a path (causal) analysis model was developed from data collected with the following instruments: The Communication Strategy Interview, the Construction of the Child Interview, The Family Influences on Childrearing Interview (all of which were used to assess parental beliefs about developmental states and processes and to assess childrearing strategies and family practices); The Parent‐Child Interaction Observation System [based on Sigel's (1979) distancing theory of representational competence, this was used to identify different types of parent‐child interactions in structured teaching contexts and in semistructured story‐telling task]; and a series of standard evaluation tests and nonverbal Piagetian tasks that focused on transformation, memory, sequencing and anticipation to evaluate children's level of cognitive functioning and representational abilities.