Stress In Greek Mothers With Deaf Children: Effects of Child Characteristics, Family Resources and Cognitive Set

Abstract

In an effort to understand the impact of their children's deafness on Greek mothers, demographic, disability-related and stress characteristics were examined with 42 hearing mothers and their deaf children. The work was based on Hill's ABCX model and Bronfenbrenner's social ecology model, entailing a microsystem, mesosystem, ecosystem, and macrosystem. In addition to child history obtained from school records, Rotter's locus of control scale, Coopersmith's self-esteem inventory and the Clarke questionnaire on resources and stress were given to mothers. Onset of deafness before 18 months of age was associated with greater maternal stress. A tendency for mothers of younger children to report more stress was evident. The mothers mainly had an external locus of control, attributing events to outside agents beyond their control. Self-esteem proved the best predictor of stress, with a low-esteem associated with greater reported stress. The findings are discussed with reference to disability-related and cultural factors.

Exploring Correlates and Predictors of Stress in Parents of Children Who are Deaf: Implications of Perceived Social Support and Mode of Communication

“…However, in support of previous research, degree of hearing loss was not significantly related to parenting stress in this sample (Konstantareas and Lampropoulou 1995). Again, we note that our findings regarding demographic variables may be sample-specific and should be viewed as a compliment to the existing literature, not as an effort to debunk it.…”

“…Thus, inclusion of various demographic variables that will allow for more accurate comparisons across studies, is paramount. For example, a family's financial resources or income (Pipp-Siegel et al 2002) and age of the child (Hagborg 1989;Konstantareas and Lampropoulou 1995;Pipp-Siegel et al 2002) may be related independently to parenting stress.…”

“…Finally, results regarding the effect of degree of hearing loss on reports of parenting stress are variable with some investigations showing no significant relationship (Konstantareas and Lampropoulou 1995), while others suggested that less hearing loss may be related to higher stress by ways of more dysfunctional parent-child interactions (Pipp-Siegel et al 2002).…”

Marital Relationship in Greek Families Raising a Child with a Severe Disability

“…al., 1997;Patterson, 1991). On the contrary, this finding is not consistent to those according to which families with a mentally retarded child (Friedrich & Friedich, 1981), as well as couples with children with hearing difficulties experience quite low marital satisfaction (Konstantareas & Lambropoulou, 1995).…”

Pediatric hearing impairment caregiver experience: Impact of duration of hearing loss on parental stress

“…Some evidence suggests that hearing parents of children who are deaf/hard of hearing (hoh) feel more stress than parents of hearing children [3,8], while some studies report no difference in stress levels between the two groups of parents [4][5][6]. The types of stress reported by parents of children who are deaf/hoh may be different from that of parents of hearing children and specific to the child's hearing impairment, such as stress about degree of hearing loss, age of identification [11], language ability [6], and mode of communication [10].…”