Stress in Adolescents with a Chronically Ill Parent: Inspiration from Rolland's Family Systems-Illness Model.
Family warmth and secure teen-parent bonds, not the parent's diagnosis, predict how stressed adolescents feel.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers asked teens about stress while one parent lived with a long-term illness. They also measured how the family talked to each other and how close the teen felt to parents.
The team wanted to know if the kind of illness mattered, or if family life mattered more.
What they found
Warm family talk and strong teen-parent bonds lowered stress. The illness label made no difference.
Girls felt more stress than boys, but good family ties still helped them most.
How this fits with other research
Bailey et al. (2010) saw the same pattern in disability families: early parent stress and child behavior, not the diagnosis, shaped later teen-parent closeness.
van Schrojenstein Lantman-de Valk et al. (2006) and Petrovic et al. (2016) also show family-level stress, not child labels, drives parent mood and family unity.
Freeman et al. (2015) pools 19 studies showing parents of sick kids feel worse themselves. Together the papers say: look at how the family works day-to-day, not just the medical chart.
Why it matters
You can ease teen stress without fixing the parent's illness. Start joint pleasant activities, teach assertive yet kind talk, and check the teen's feeling of safety with each parent. Add brief attachment check-ins to your intake forms. These steps may do more than any report on the disease name.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This article was inspired by Rolland's Family Systems-Illness (FSI) model, aiming to predict adolescent stress as a function of parental illness type. Ninety-nine parents with a chronic medical condition, 82 partners, and 158 adolescent children (51 % girls; mean age = 15.1 years) participated in this Dutch study. The Dutch Stress Questionnaire for Children was used to measure child report of stress. Ill parents completed the Beck Depression Inventory. Children filled in a scale of the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment measuring the quality of parent attachment. Both parents filled in the Parent-Child-Interaction Questionnaire-Revised. We conducted multilevel regression analyses including illness type, the ill parent's depressive symptoms, family functioning (quality of marital relationship, parent-child interaction, and parent attachment), and adolescents' gender and age. Four regression analyses were performed separately for each illness type as defined by disability (Model 1), and onset (Model 2), course (Model 3), and outcome of illness (Model 4). In all models, higher adolescent stress scores were linked to lower quality of parent-child interaction and parent attachment, and adolescents' female gender. The four models explained approximately 37 % of the variance in adolescent stress between individuals and 43-44 % of the variance in adolescent stress between families. Adolescent stress was not related to parental illness type. Our results partially supported the FSI model stating that family functioning is essential in point of child adjustment to parental illness. In the chronic stage of parental illness, adolescent stress does not seem to vary depending on illness type.
Journal of developmental and physical disabilities, 2012 · doi:10.1177/00131640021970466