No abstract

The cross-sectional analyses used in this study shows the differences in the lives of mothers with intellectual impairment and their young infants compared with their peers. Longitudinal analyses across subsequent waves of the MCS will allow protective and risk factors in the early years that influence later developmental outcomes to be identified.

Parenting by people with intellectual disability continues to confront societal sensibilities. On the one hand, parents with intellectual disability engage in the valued social role of raising children; on the other, their parenting attracts (typically negative) attention based on an expectation of their limited capacities to parent. The literature primarily addresses the question of whether or not parents with intellectual disability can be adequate parents or reports on methods for improving their parenting skills. An emerging trend in the literature over the last decade takes a different perspective. Rather than concentrating exclusively on parents with intellectual disability, this perspective focuses on their parenting situation compared to that of other parents more generally. This paper reviews the current state of knowledge about parents and parenting with intellectual disability in this broader population context. The focus of the paper is on the use of larger scale datasets to understand the situation of parents with intellectual disability compared with other parents and to examine the contextual variables that influence their parenting.

Accessible summary  Many mothers with learning difficulties want help with meeting people and making friends, and ‘getting out and about’ in their community.  We worked with mothers with learning difficulties and family support workers to create a programme, the ASLP, to help mothers achieve their goals to get out and about in the community.  This programme involves mothers meeting, talking and learning together over a 12‐week period. Mothers also receive one to one support to work on their individual goals.  We tested the programme with 32 mothers and most mothers achieved their goals and now feel better about themselves and more confident about being in the community.  This programme is now available for other service workers to use to support mothers with learning difficulties in their communities. Summary Mothers with learning difficulties are often isolated within their local communities. They also report low levels of social support. Social disconnection is associated with high levels of stress and poorer mental health, and in turn, adverse parenting and child outcomes. In the study reported here, a multi‐site, intervention group only, repeated measures research design was employed to determine the efficacy of a group‐based, adult‐learning programme designed to strengthen the social relationships and improve the psychological wellbeing of mothers with learning difficulties. Thirty‐two mothers with learning difficulties completed the programme across six sites in Australia. The effects of the programme on perceived social support and psychological wellbeing were substantially greater than established benchmarks for parent‐training and family support programmes. These promising findings warrant further investigation, ideally employing a randomised‐controlled trial design.

That controlling for between-group differences in exposure to socio-economic disadvantage largely eliminated evidence of poorer health among parents with intellectual impairment is consistent with the view that a significant proportion of the poorer health of people with IDs may be attributable to their poorer living conditions rather than biological factors associated with ID per se.