Family adjustment to childhood cognitive disability and parental stress

Cognitive Disabilities and Family

Cognitive Disability and Family

Families with a cognitive disability, such as mental retardation, Alzheimer's or related conditions, face many challenges. Families must make many adjustments and must be able to adapt to the condition. Some families adapt easily, while others struggle to come to terms with the reality of the situation. The following will explore literature related to cognitive disability and their families.

Impact on Family

The news that one's child has a severe cognitive disability can have a significant impact on the family's ability to adjust. This news means many adjustments and changes in plans for many. Psychologists have searched for ways to measure and predict the ability of families to adjust to cognitive disability in their children. A recent study tested several measurement scales and found that their ability to identify families that are at-risk for maladjustment differ significantly. Stress in mothers was easier to detect than in fathers (Trute & Hierbert-Murphy, 2005). Anderson, Catroppa, & Morse et al. (2005) investigated factors that help to predict adjustment in families whose child had suffered traumatic brain injury.

The impact of the cognitive disability on the family and their ability to access the resources available to them is another key area of research. Improvements to assistive technology and their impact on the person with disabilities and their families is another key area of research into this area. There are a number of elements involved in the functioning of families with children with cognitive disabilities that have gained academic attention. Many are concerned with how the family manages to function and cope with their circumstances.

Anther related area of academic research involving families is the effectiveness of interventions to help families cope with the stress associated with having a child with cognitive disabilities. Most of the research found in this area worked under the assumption that families experienced a considerable amount to stress associated with the cognitive abilities of one of its family members. This body of research did not consider the possibility that the family would not be stressed by the experience. This factor represents the presence of bias in the body of literature examined.

Discussion

Academic literature regarding families living with persons with cognitive disabilities can be divided into two distinctive categories. One group deals with cognitive disability and heir birth family. The other deals with families created through the marriage of two persons with cognitive disabilities. The diversity of topics within these areas was thin. One could find a number of studies that focused on the same topic within the wider subject area, such as family stress and ability to access services. A number of studies focused on the two major subject areas without much variation.

Bias was found in many of the articles that assumed that the family experienced stress when they had someone in the family with a cognitive disability. Although the research did not approach the topic, it is possible that the degree of severity of the cognitive disability may have an impact on the amount of actual stress experienced by the family. This area would make an excellent topic for future research into the area. One might also attempt to determine if all families with someone with cognitive disabilities actually experiences stress that was assumed to exist in other studies. It may be that those studies picked a biased sample and that stress may be less of a factor than the current body of literature would have one believe.

Research into stress and the families of persons with cognitive disabilities has a considerable amount of consensus among the researchers. They al agree the having a child with disabilities is stressful. However, there is a concern that this consensus may be the result of bias, more than a result of actual research findings. No researchers could be found that asked the fundamental question of if the family experienced stress as a result of living with someone with cognitive impairment. There may be families where the situation is not as stressful and others that are struggling with the strain. Studies in this area assumed that families were under a high degree of stress. These researchers agreed that the coping abilities of the family and the degree of the mental condition were key factors in the degree of stress experienced.

One of the key areas of research into this area focuses on is the issue of persons with cognitive disabilities having children of their own. This is a highly controversial topic that has developed as a political and social debate as well. This is one area where a lack of consensus exists. The topic is highly emotional, particularly for those that are cognitively impaired and that with to have children and a family of their own. One of the key observations regarding literature in this area is that researchers tended to take sides early in the study, even before data was collected. This may indicate that a degree of bias was present in those studies.

The topic of families and persons with cognitive disabilities was conducted largely by individual researchers, backed by universities. There are a few research foundations that have published information, but the topic has remained a largely academic one. Much of the research published by organizations appeared in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Some of agencies that have studied the topic of cognitive disability and family are the American Association on Mental Retardation, the Arc of the United States, the President's Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities, and the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Aging with Developmental Disabilities (Family Village, 2006). These agencies addressed the topic of family and cognitive disability in response to a growing concern for persons with cognitive disabilities and their ability to access quality health care and services. Their sole purpose is to make the lives of those with cognitive disabilities and their families better.

One area that was missed in the literature was the effectiveness of various intervention strategies in reducing stress in families with persons with disabilities. It is not known what interventions have been tried and which ones were most effective in helping families to build coping mechanisms and reduce stress. This is the obvious next step into developing a thorough understanding of the topic area.

This literature review revealed several key trends into research regarding families and cognitive impairment. This area continues to be an area of interest. However, the focus seems to be shifting from a psychological perspective into a sociological based approach. There is much more interest in recent years regarding the issues of cognitive disability and its impact on society at large. In the area of persons with cognitive disability, having families of their own, politics will play a factor in the direction of research in the future.