Youth adjustment to parental illness or disability: The role of illness characteristics, caregiving, and attachment

Abstract

This study aimed to (1) examine relations between youth adjustment and three sets of predictors: parental illness/disability characteristics, caregiving, and parent-child attachment, and (2) explore differences on these variables between youths of parental physical illness/disability and youths of parental mental illness. Eighty-one youths between 10 and 25 years of a parent with a physical illness/disability (35%) or a mental illness (43%) completed a series of self-report measures assessing perceived characteristics of the parent's illness/disability, caregiving experiences, and adjustment outcomes. Results revealed a set of predictors of poorer youth adjustment: gradual illness/disability onset, being male, isolation, lower perceived maturity, and less choice in caregiving. Youths of parental mental illness differed from youths of parental physical illness/disability on emotional distress (worry and discomfort) dimensions of caregiving. Youth-parent attachment security was associated with youth caregiving and there was a trend for attachment to vary according to parental illness/disability type. Findings highlight young caregiving as an important target for service and policy planning.

Young carers: growing up with chronic illness in the family - a systematic review 2007-2017

“…Children in single households are still more likely to be involved in caregiving than children whose parents live together [12][13][14]. Study findings also confirm that care is provided for chronically ill mothers in the majority of cases [5,15]; the results on this aspect vary between 67 and 75% [12,13,[16][17][18][19][20].…”

“…Study findings also confirm that care is provided for chronically ill mothers in the majority of cases [5,15]; the results on this aspect vary between 67 and 75% [12,13,[16][17][18][19][20]. Apart from the mothers, it is often the grandmother who receives care from young carers, followed by chronically ill siblings.…”

“…5, 13, 19] but internationally are not applied homogeneously so that only a limited comparison of study results from different research groups is possible. A further difficulty for comparing results lies in the varying age definitions for young carers in other countries [2], particularly in Australia where young adults up to 25 years of age are included in the surveys [12,16,19,22,24,34,37].…”

“…They have a strong "we-feeling" in the family, are satisfied with the family's team spirit and are able to confront all the demands of everyday life [13]. Furthermore, a parent-child relationship is stronger if a parent has a physical impairment than if the disease is a psychological one [12]. Affected families frequently experience tensions and potential conflict [32], reaching from domestic violence via detachment from the family to considerable shifts in a family's formation [29].…”

Confirmatory factor analysis and invariance testing of the Young Carer of Parents Inventory (YCOPI).

“…In further support of the framework above and the validity of the YCOPI, the instrument has demonstrated relations with theoreti cally relevant variables, including individual level mediators (e.g., coping strategies, stress appraisal, stigma) of the Family Ecology Framework (Fraser & Pakenham, 2009;Ireland & Pakenham, 2010a;Pakenham & Cox, 2012A), other measures of caregiving activities (Ireland & Pakenham, 2010a;Ireland & Pakenham, 2010b;Pakenham & Cox, 2012b), youth adjustment outcomes , and caregiving contextual variables such as level of parental disability, parental illness unpredictability, and choice in caregiving . Validity has also been established by distinguishing between children of healthy parents and those of parents who experience a significant medical condition Sieh, VisserMeily, & Meijer, 2013) and between children of a parent with phys ical illness and those of a parent with mental illness (Ireland & Pakenham, 2010a).…”