Reactions of Parents to Disabilities

REACTION OF PARENTS TO DISABILITIES

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Parents of children with disabilities also needs help because of some of their reaction towards disabilities. The following are the reactions of parents towards disability and why they should be help:

1.      Unhappiness: When a mother is pregnant, the expectation of a perfect baby who will be without any blemish in the anticipation, the expectant woman will make adequate prenatal preparation for the provision of maternal and baby care items. The antenatal talks emphases the care that the expectant mother should take during the various stages of gestation and delivery as well as postnatal care that will all be goal directed to having non disabled baby. In the height of this expectation, if at birth or later in life the mother discover any deformities even if it is not too severe the mother feels bad and become unhappy.  No matter an individual biological composition can cope with problems, the initial reaction of unhappiness is general to all parents. The prolonged unhappiness can develop into psychological disturbances that leads to depression if such parents are not helped by professionals.

2.      Rejection: The parents of the disabled often reject or abandon the child in public places if disability is identify early. Our society do not have high regards for parents whose child has disability thus, parents will not be proud of introducing the child as their child to other people. Some parents may skilfully leave the child care of their old parents in the village. They may not be visiting the elder and the child because they have no psychological attachment to the child so parents needs the help of the services provider to learn how to accept and live with such child.

3.      Negative self concepts: The parents are more negatively affected by the negative attitude of the people around children with disability. The parents may gradually loose their sense of identity and belonginess to their various social classes or groups because of shame. Such parents look down on themselves to others who have non disabled children. The parents develop the feeling of loss of social integrity which develop into inferiority complex

4.      Shock: The initial reaction of every parents is shock, disbelieve and disappointment which are responsible for the sadness that is usually associated with the parents discovery of any abnormality in their children body. The parents are shock and surprised that their long time expectation of their beautiful looking baby is shattered by the appearance of physical disabilities or any kind of disabilities.

5.     Parents live with stress: Parents of children with disabilities juggle many stressors, such as multiple health visits and consultations with educational specialists, and may be dealing with other family stressors including sibling difficulties. Siblings may also experience stress and their needs may go unnoticed, or they may have challenging behaviours as a response to their feelings of sorrow or anger. Parents are likely to be confronted with limited support resources in the community and long waiting lists, or they may encounter unsympathetic health professionals that they have to struggle with to access resources. As well, many families of children with a disability are economically strained as mothers may not be able to return to work and there may be extra expenses in supporting the child.

Many children with disabilities have challenging behavioural disturbances or complex physical needs which can place an enormous stress on families. Some children with disabilities also have psychological maladjustments as a consequence of their disability or treatment. Health professionals often do not understand the complexity of these families' experiences and the huge demands involved in supporting a child with a serious disability.

6.      Parents live with loss: Where there is trauma there is also loss, although the literature tends to separate these two phenomena. Parents of children with a disability are likely to experience many concurrent losses. The first loss might be the diagnosis, which shatters the parents' worldview that they will have a normal child. Parents need information in a staged process so that they can start to assimilate the news, and need to feel that the professional who delivers the news is sensitive and supportive (Cantwell-Bartl & Tibballs, 2008). Grieving is an ongoing feature of raising a child with a disability and tends to be far more intense for mothers than fathers (Bruce, 2000), with fathers tending to express their grief in concrete terms. Parents experience grief over time and often have intense wishing for what might have been. As well as the grief of diagnosis, parents of children with a disability are likely to experience many secondary losses which continue to unfold. For this reason the loss experienced by parents has been termed cumulative or non-finite loss (Bruce & Schultz, 2001). For example, parents could grieve over the child's lack of achievement of developmental, academic and social markers, and ongoing stigmatisation. Parents are likely to also grieve for themselves and the lost opportunities for personal growth and achievement, as every aspect of their life may be threatened and changed. They are more likely to be socially isolated as friendships change, and extended family can withdraw in response to the child's disability. The grief of the parents is complex. The literature on loss tends to focus upon bereavement, but bereavement is centred on a single loss. Although stage models of grief are still employed, perhaps a more appropriate model is the Dual Process Model (Stroebe & Schut, 2001) which, in contrast to a staged response, is open-ended and allows for people to swing between confrontation and avoidance of the loss in order to maintain stability. Denial may be appropriate, for example, a belief that a child may walk one day may give a parent hope and extra resources, and allow time for the parent to adapt to a devastating diagnosis. Parents need to be able to speak openly about their experiences, and to speak of their sorrow and other intense feelings such as guilt, shame, disappointment or anger.

7.      Parents usually adapt and develop many resources: In spite of the many difficulties associated with caring for a child with a disability, parents often adapt and develop a great deal of resilience in response to their care demands. Many parents develop skills and strategies that they never could have imagined if their child did not have a disability. It is common for parents to say that they have become more compassionate, and some parents become more focused upon what gives meaning in living. Most parents care for their children faithfully and with great commitment, and speak of the many joys in this work despite the difficulties. These trends towards adaptive responses are consistent with the phenomenon of ‘posttraumatic growth' (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004). This is defined as the experience where people have positive impacts after a negative event due to strengthened perceptions about self and others and the meaning of events.

8.      Parents may experience trauma: Contemporary research on parents of children with disabilities has found that parents frequently experience traumatic stress and that traumatic symptoms can endure (see, for example, O'Neill, 2005). Parents may experience trauma at various times, such as at the time of diagnosis or in response to treatment, or when a child is hospitalised, particularly if the child has to spend long periods in hospital. Some parents are more susceptible to traumatic stress reactions than others, particularly where there are multiple concurrent stressors, as stressors weaken resources. Other causes of susceptibility include a parent's own difficult childhood experiences or previous traumas. Studies have found that mothers are particularly prone to trauma (Landolt et al., 2005), but all parents are susceptible to traumatic reactions if a stressor is intense. Some parents experience a number of traumatic incidents, for example, at the time of the diagnosis immediately after birth, followed by surgery, then intensive care, and then life-threatening complications. Parents may have so much with which to contend at this time that their own self-care is bypassed.