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Coping with the care of a severely disabled child
Author(s) -
Beresford Bryony
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
health and social care in the community
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.984
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1365-2524
pISSN - 0966-0410
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2524.1996.tb00045.x
Subject(s) - coping (psychology) , psychology , distress , qualitative research , emotional distress , grounded theory , creativity , developmental psychology , coping behavior , social psychology , clinical psychology , anxiety , psychiatry , social science , sociology
The unrelenting, and often overwhelming, stresses experienced by parents caring for a disabled child have been well charted, as have their impact on personal and family well‐being. This paper reports on a study which took such research a step further by focusing on the ways parents cope with the stresses and strains of care. An in‐depth qualitative approach was used in a longitudinal study of 20 families caring for a severely disabled child. The work was theoretically grounded in Lazarus & Folkman's (1984) process model of stress and coping, which emphasizes the importance of coping strategies and coping resources in mediating the adverse effects of stress. The paper reports on the way in which the negative aspects of caring for a disabled child were balanced by two positive factors: the parent‐child relationship and the ways parents coped with the problems they encountered and the emotional distress they felt. Parents were found to have a wide range of coping strategies and they employed enormous creativity to deal with the problems they faced. These included strategies which acted directly on the source of stress, information‐seeking, planning, taking control, and self‐maintenance strategies. The role of services in supporting parents in the ways they chose to cope is illustrated.