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Article Excerpt
Grandparents, and particularly grandmothers, are an important source of family support for parents of young children with developmental disabilities. This study, examines the relationship between parenting stress of mothers and fathers and their grandmother support, self-esteem, and key family attributes. For mothers (N = 60), Time1 self-esteem, and emotional support from maternal and paternal grandmothers jointly accounted for 28% of the variance in parenting stress at Time2. Higher self-esteem and grandmother emotional support were related to lower parenting stress in mothers. For fathers (N = 41), Time1 self-esteem and Time 1 level of parenting stress in their conjugal partners accounted for 28% of the variance with parenting stress at Time2. Higher self-esteem and lower spousal parenting stress were related to low parenting stress in fathers. While support from grandmothers was an important predictor of parenting stress for mothers, grandmother support did not predict parenting stress over time for fathers. These findings suggest important gender patterns in the value of grandparent support and the saliency of parent self-esteem in coping with parenting stress by parents of young children with developmental disabilities.
Keywords: developmental disabilities, grandparents, self concept, gender differences
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Grandparents are an obvious source of social network support for families with young children with disabilities. To date, much of the sparse research on grandparent support has relied on qualitative research designs or has been based on anecdotal parent or professional reports, and has largely focused on the experiences of mothers (e.g., Katz & Kessel, 2002; Mirfin-Veitch, Bray, & Watson, 1997; Nybo, Scherman, & Freeman, 1998). Part of the reason for this is the challenge of creating adequately large and random samples of grandparents who are still living at the time of the entry of the child with disabilities to the life of their families.
However, a small number of quantitative studies have been reported in recent years. Key findings of these studies suggest that: (a) grandmothers are seen as being more supportive than grandfathers, and maternal grandmothers tend to be more supportive than paternal grandmothers (Findler, 2000; Seligman, Goodwin, Paschal, Applegate, & Lehman, 1997; Trute, 2003); (b) grandparent support is more common than support from other relatives or friends (Findler, 2000; Green, 2001); (c) grandparent instrumental support (or practical help) tends to decrease as the child with the disability grows older (Heller, Hsieh, & Rowitz, 2000); and (d) grandparent emotional support is more salient to enhanced parent psychological adjustment and reduced parenting stress than is instrumental support (Findler, 2000; Heller et al., 2000; Trute, 2003).
In the body of stress and coping literature on families of children with disabilities, special attention is given to psychosocial resources that enhance coping and adaptation to serious and persistent life challenges and stressors. The well-established "process model of stress and coping" (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) has been of particular utility in studies of families with children with disabilities (Beresford, 1993). This model gives central attention to the importance of psychosocial coping resources available as mediators of each person's coping and adaptation. Coping resources have also been identified as playing a key role in family paradigms of stress and coping. The ABCX (McCubbin & Patterson, 1983) and the Family Adjustment and Adaptation Response (FAAR) (Patterson, 2002) models put emphasis on the importance of internal (or psychological) and external (or social network) support resources in understanding patterns of family coping and adaptation (Aldwin, 1994).
External social support has been a salient concern in the study of families with children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The support provided to these families tends to occur within small, high-density social networks (Kazak, 1986; Kazak & Wilcox, 1984). There is evidence that the most resilient of these families are skilled users of social network resources and benefit importantly from positive, "close-tie" social support (Kazak & Wilcox, 1984; Trute & Hauch, 1988). There appear to be gender differences in parental use of social support resources. For example, men and women differ in the ways they participate in social relations and in the resources they seek from relationships when coping with stress; women are more likely to seek out and receive social network support (Barnett et al., 1987). Men's mobilization of support is heavily focused on one person, typically their conjugal partner (Belle, 1987). While women tend to seek social support from family members and friends, men tend to not seek support from sources other than their intimate conjugal partner (Cutrona, 1996). When considering close-tie social support in couples, and the emotional interdependence within intimate relations, "contagion of stress" has been observed whereby conjugal partners not only are affected by their own psychological reaction to stress but also by their partner's emotional coping with stress (Cutrona, 1996, p. 81).
Internal coping resources are a key component in the process model of stress and coping. Self-esteem has been viewed as a cognitive coping resource, in that persons with positive self-esteem prior to a challenge or crisis are more likely to use adaptive coping (Brown, 1993). This is consistent with stress and coping theory in that self-worth or self-esteem is identified as an "internal coping resource" (Pearlin, 1985) which appears to mediate the negative effects of stressors (Kobasa, 1987). White (1985) suggests that self-esteem is "often put on trial" by serious life challenges, and successful adaptation requires maintenance of positive self-view (p. 137).
This study seeks to advance the preliminary findings that suggest there are gender differences in parental response to grandparent support, particularly grandmother support, and its effects on parenting stress (Hastings, Thomas, & Delwiche, 2002; Trute, 2003), and further, tests the importance of the internal coping resource of self-esteem in parents of young children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Our design is stronger than that employed in some of the previous research, as we use a service-based sample (rather than a convenience sample) of families of children with disabilities and longitudinal data to address our research questions. We track mother and father...
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