Child's positive and negative impacts on parents--a person-oriented approach to understanding temperament in preschool children with intellectual disabilities.
Preschoolers with ID fall into three temperament clusters, and the “disruptive” one overloads moms while leaving dads untouched.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team looked at preschoolers with intellectual disability. They asked parents how the child’s mood and behavior affected them day-to-day.
Using a person-oriented method, they grouped kids by temperament style. Then they checked if each style raised or lowered parent stress.
What they found
Three clear clusters popped out: easy, slow-to-warm, and disruptive. Moms of disruptive kids felt more negative and less positive impact.
Surprise: dads reported no link between child style and how they felt. Only moms carried the extra load.
How this fits with other research
Burack et al. (2004) saw the same mom-focus. They found moms voiced more negative emotion toward the child with ID than toward brothers or sisters.
Levavi et al. (2020) flipped the father picture. They showed playful dads buffered behavior problems, even though dads in Leung et al. (2011) felt no temperament sting.
Feniger-Schaal et al. (2013) added a path forward. Moms who made peace with the diagnosis later showed warmer play, hinting that acceptance can soften the stress K et al. found.
Why it matters
You now have a fast screen: label a child’s temperament cluster and you can flag which moms may need extra support. Offer father-focused play coaching, because playful dads can cut problem behavior even when temperament does not bother them. Finally, add brief acceptance work for mothers; resolving diagnosis grief boosts sensitivity and may shrink the stress gap the clusters create.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Despite previous efforts to understand temperament in children with intellectual disability (ID), and how child temperament may affect parents, the approach has so far been unidimensional. Child temperament has been considered in relation to diagnosis, with the inherent risk of overlooking individual variation of children's temperament profiles within diagnostic groups. The aim of the present study was to identify temperamental profiles of children with ID, and investigate how these may affect parents in terms of positive and negative impacts. METHOD: Parent-rated temperament in children with ID was explored through a person-oriented approach (cluster analysis). Children with ID (N=49) and typically developing (TD) children (N=82) aged between 4 and 6 years were clustered separately. RESULTS: Variation in temperament profiles was more prominent among children with ID than in TD children. Out of the three clusters found in the ID group, the disruptive, and passive/withdrawn clusters were distinctly different from clusters found in the TD group in terms of temperament, while the cluster active and outgoing was similar in shape and level of temperament ratings of TD children. Children within the disruptive cluster were described to have more negative and less positive impacts on mothers compared to children within the other clusters in the ID group. CONCLUSIONS: Mothers who describe their children as having disruptive temperament may be at particular risk for experiencing higher parenting stress as they report that the child has higher negative and lower positive impacts than other parents describe. The absence of a relationship between child temperament profile and positive or negative impact on fathers may indicate that fathers are less affected by child temperament. However, this relationship needs to be further explored.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2011 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2011.03.017