Individual Psychological and Family Resources of Mothers Raising Children with Disabilities

Abstract

<p style="text-align: justify;">An important task of clinical psychology is to study the resources of coping with difficult life situations and the stress of children with disabilities’ mothers. The purpose of the study is to analyze the differences between individual and family psychological resources of mothers raising disabled children and mothers of neurotypical children and to identify groups of mothers by the level of their psychological resources. 392 mothers took part in the study using the author's socio-biographical questionnaire, the self-activation of personality method, a short version of the resilience test, the COPE questionnaire, and the family viability assessment scale (139 raise disabled children (medium age 42.58+7.4), 253 – healthy children (medium age 42.63+8.4)). It is shown that mothers of children with disabilities estimate the intensity of events related to diseases and problems in relationships higher than mothers of healthy children. Mothers of children with disabilities are distinguished by a reduced level of resilience resources, some components of the self-activation resource (physical activity), the severity of instrumental resources, such as: the concentration on emotions, active coping, suppression of competing activities, planning, an active cognitive coping style. But the size of the effect in the differences is small. Based on cluster analysis, three groups of mothers were identified, characterized by a peculiar profile of individual and family psychological resources: "resource", "moderately resource", "insufficiently resource". The specific features of each of the profiles and the possibilities of applying the obtained data in practice are shown.</p>