Abstract:

Parenting is a challenging process. The crucial role of parents and family in caring, nurturing, protecting and socializing young children is well established across the cultures. Strong parent-child connectedness improves child academic outcomes, self esteem, mental health and has later protective effects of reducing the likelihood of alcohol and drug use in adolescence, high risk sexual behaviour and involvements in interpersonal violence (Lezin et al., 2004). Parenting can influence children’s social, emotional, and academic adjustment, efforts have been made to determine factors that affect parenting behavior. One such factor is parenting stress. Parenting stress can be defined as excess anxiety and tension specifically related to the role of a parent and to parent-child interactions (Abidin, 1995). When the parents learn that the child is having some form of disability, it causes enormous distress to them. Giving birth to a mentally challenged children or other disabled child is an unexpected stressful event which affects the whole family. Such an event may impair family development and may continue over time affecting the entire family system. The presence of a mentally challenged child in the family has far reaching implication for the family as a whole. The impact of the disability and problem associated with it are not restricted to the child but extend far beyond the child and affects a number of areas of family functioning as well as individual’s adjustment. Parents go through intense emotional and psychological stress and may have fewer resources of emotional gratification. They may consider mentally handicapped child as a threat to their self esteem and view themselves as a source of disability. They struggle to cope with the financial costs, parents also are confronted with new and unexpected experiences. Parents with disabled child may have higher levels of stress and lower levels of well being than with the normal children (Rangaswamy and Bhavani, 2008). In order to have better understanding of the factors that influence parenting stress which plays a crucial role in development of child both normal and challenged, the present study was undertaken with the objective to compare the level of stress among parents between normal and mentally challenged children

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