Experienced dyadic emotion regulation and coping of parents with a seriously ill child.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to identify and describe parents’ experiences of jointly regulating their emotions when their child gets life-threateningly sick. The aim of this study was also to find out the parents’ experiences of the significance of dyadic emotion regulation for their personal coping and to discover the challenges in their dyadic emotion regulation. A purposive sample of 32 parents of seriously ill children was recruited from the Department of Pediatrics in Kuopio University Hospital and interviewed within 3 weeks of their child’s diagnosis. Videotaped interviews were analyzed by interpretative phenomenological analysis. The main themes of analysis were the recognition and disclosure of the needs of dyadic emotion regulation, load sharing and dyadic regulation of emotions, the importance of dyadic emotion regulation in terms of coping, and the challenges of dyadic emotion regulation. The subthemes of load sharing and dyadic regulation of emotions were recognizing another’s emotions; direct expression versus avoiding emotions; nonverbal interaction, presence, and intimacy; and verbal interaction. The results help health-care personnel to understand the connection between a child’s illness and the parents’ couple relationship, to recognize parents’ needs for emotional support, and to develop appropriate couple interventions for parents.

Couples’ dyadic coping in the context of child-related stressors: A systematic review across three decades.

“…A third group of parents reported comparatively low levels of stress communication, while DC of partners and common DC efforts were high (Körner et al, 2013). Avoiding emotions mostly served to protect each other (Koivula et al, 2019), though couples considered direct expression of emotions to be important (Arruda-Colli et al, 2018; Koivula et al, 2019).…”

“…Parents were required to navigate between emotional and cognitive demands, that is, to allow the expression of difficult emotions without overpowering decision-making in the process of treatment (Hamama-Raz et al, 2012). To be able to cope with the situation, couples mentioned the importance of load sharing, being sensitive to each other, and emphasized the importance of recognition and disclosure of the needs for adequate dyadic emotion regulation (Arruda-Colli et al, 2018; Hamama-Raz et al, 2012; Koivula et al, 2019). Strategies such as helping to reframe an event, expressing solidarity with the partner, providing practical support and empathic understanding (i.e., emotion-focused DC) resulted in feeling stronger as a couple (Arruda-Colli et al, 2018).…”

“…Coping together as a unit through adapting a “we”-perspective (common DC: Bodenmann, 1995; collaborative DC: Berg & Upchurch, 2007) was found to be particularly relevant to overcome child-related stressors. Barriers for couples coping together as a team were having different coping styles or avoiding expressing emotions in order to protect each other (Koivula et al, 2019). This avoidance in order to protect the partner is also known from other stressors like suffering from a chronic disease (Langer et al, 2009) and is well described in the concept of protective buffering (Coyne & Smith, 1991) that revealed to be dysfunctional in previous studies (Perndorfer et al, 2019).…”

“…Ways of Coping. When dealing with chronic physical illness of the child, different parental coping patterns were identified (Koivula et al, 2019;Körner et al, 2013). While some couples can be described as avoiders with low levels of common DC, others actively negotiated with high levels of common DC, high levels of stress communication and high agreements between the ratings of both partners.…”

Psychiatric symptoms and couple satisfaction in parents of newborns before and during the COVID‐19 pandemic—A comparison of two prospective studies

“…On the other hand, high couple satisfaction and positive dyadic coping can relieve these stressors and decrease the risk of anxiety and depression (Koivula et al, 2019;Razurel et al, 2017;Yu et al, 2020).…”