Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 7:4 2002
© 2002 Oxford University Press
Empirical Articles |
Parenting Stress and Social Support in Hearing Mothers of Deaf and Hearing Children: A Longitudinal Study
Georgia State University
This longitudinal study investigated the impact of child deafness on mothers' stress, size of social networks, and satisfaction with social support. Twenty-three hearing mothers of deaf children and 23 hearing mothers of hearing children completed a series of self-report questionnaires when their children were 22 months, 3, and 4 years old. When children were 22 months, more mothers of deaf children reported pessimism about their children's achieving self-sufficiency and concerns about their children's communication abilities than did mothers of hearing children. When their children were 3 and 4 years old, mothers of deaf and hearing children did not differ in their reports of general parenting stress, as measured by the Parenting Stress Index (PSI). Likewise, mothers' ratings of satisfaction with social support were not affected by child deafness, nor did they change developmentally. Mothers of deaf and hearing children did differ in the types of support networks utilized. Mothers of deaf 22-month-olds reported significantly larger professional support networks, while mothers of hearing children reported significantly larger general support networks across all child ages. Mothers' feelings of stress and satisfaction with social support were very stable across the 2 years examined. The results suggest that most mothers of deaf children do not feel a high level of general parenting stress or dissatisfaction with their lives and support networks. However, mothers of deaf children are likely to feel stress in areas specific to deafness. In addition, because parenting stress was highly stable, special efforts should be made to intervene when mothers of deaf children are expressing high levels of stress.
This research was partially supported by the March of Dimes Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education. Portions of this work were presented at the Society for Research in Child Development, Albuquerque, New Mexico, April 1999. Correspondence should be sent to Amy R. Lederberg, Department of Educational Psychology and Special Education, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303 (e-mail: alederberg{at}gsu.edu).
Received May 22, 2001; revised November 27, 2001; accepted November 30, 2001
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