Psychological well-being of fathers with and without a child with intellectual disability: a population-based study.
Child behavior and poverty hurt fathers more than the ID diagnosis itself.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Granieri et al. (2020) asked fathers about life satisfaction and health.
Some fathers had a child with intellectual disability. Others did not.
The team looked at money problems, child behavior, and disability status to see what hurt dads most.
What they found
Fathers of kids with ID scored only a little lower on life and health ratings.
Child behavior problems and living in poverty hurt fathers far more than the ID label.
Disability alone was not the main stress driver.
How this fits with other research
Shabani et al. (2006) saw the same small drop in well-being among Swedish parents of kids with ID.
Landon et al. (2018) and Langley et al. (2017) also found that tough child behavior, not diagnosis, best predicts parent distress in autism families.
Boudreau et al. (2015) extends the point: low-income Latina mothers feel the worst when behavior problems and poverty combine.
Why it matters
When you write a behavior plan, add a question about money stress and child behavior first.
Refer dads to respite or financial aid before assuming disability is the problem.
A quick screen for sleep, aggression, or self-injury gives you faster gains than any ID label.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Few studies have explored the well-being of fathers of children with intellectual disability (ID), despite the significant role that they play in their children's lives. The current study compared fathers of children with and without a child with ID on measures of psychological well-being (life satisfaction, work-family balance and general health) and dimensions of parenting (parenting self-efficacy and parent-child closeness) and then examined whether the presence of a child with ID in the family was a significant predictor of paternal well-being when controlling for a number of father (age, education, employment and residency), child (ID status, gender, behavioural and emotional problems) and family (income poverty and number of children in the household) variables. METHODS: Data were drawn from the third wave of the Millennium Cohort Study, a UK population-representative and cohort study, where the cohort child was 5 years of age; 256 fathers were identified as having a child with ID, with data available for 10 187 fathers without a child with ID. Fathers were compared on the four well-being and parenting outcomes and then multiple regression models were conducted to explore associations between these outcomes and variables identified as potential correlates of well-being. RESULTS: Initial group comparisons showed that there were differences in the well-being of fathers, with fathers of children with ID reporting poorer life satisfaction and general health. However, these differences were small. Regression analyses showed that child behavioural and emotional problems, living in income poverty and paternal employment were more important than disability status in predicting fathers' well-being. CONCLUSIONS: These works add to the limited amount of research on fathers using population-representative data. The current findings are consistent with rejecting a general simplistic and negative narrative that raising a child with ID puts fathers at risk of poorer outcomes. However, some fathers, such as those with children with behavioural problems and living in poverty, may require greater support. Future longitudinal research that explores the impact of paternal well-being on the long-term outcomes of children with and without ID is warranted.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2020 · doi:10.5255/UKDA-SN-5795-4