engleski

PARENTS OF SPECIAL NEEDS CHILDREN: DO THEY SOMATIZE?

Parenthood is always an extraordinary challenge, especially when it is the parenthood of a child with profound developmental difficulties. Our long-term experience in counselling of parents with special needs children has convinced us that the acceptance of the child’ s developmental difficulties is rather a long and painful process, often exhibiting the characteristics of a complicated post-traumatic grieving process. We have asked ourselves the question to what extent the parents somatize this psychological distress. The research was conducted on two samples of parents (fathers separately from mothers) of children older than three years with extremely pronounced special needs. The first sample (N1=30) included parents of children with severe neurological damage causing their impaired mobility and making them highly dependent on their parents for satisfying their everyday needs. The other group (N2=30) were parents of children without pronounced motor difficulties but with a very slow cognitive and language development. In the research, we applied the Brief Symptom Inventory, BSI (Derogatis, 1993), subscale "Somatization". This is a self-report symptom scale for the evaluation of psychopathology and psychological distress that has been developed for the use in clinical and research conditions. An assessment of the BSI’ s metric characteristics was made on the sample of 500 Croatian examinees (Štibrić, 2005), providing the satisfying psychometric indexes. In accordance with the expectations, the research yielded the result showing an elevated degree of somatization of psychological distress in both groups of our parents, and more elevated in mothers than in fathers.

parent of spacial needs children; somatization

nije evidentirano