Parenting children with down syndrome: An analysis of parenting styles, parenting dimensions, and parental stress.
Moms of kids with Down syndrome slide toward permissive parenting because they are stressed, and you can reverse the slide by treating the stress first.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Phillips et al. (2017) sent surveys to moms of kids with Down syndrome and to moms of kids without disabilities.
They asked about parenting styles, daily stress, and how strict or warm the moms felt they were.
What they found
Mothers of kids with Down syndrome said they were less firm-yet-warm and more easy-going than the other moms.
The extra stress these moms felt explained part of the shift toward looser rules.
How this fits with other research
Fucà et al. (2025) looked deeper and found moms report higher stress than dads, so our parent coaching should give moms extra coping tools.
Takahashi et al. (2023) saw a similar pattern in Chinese moms of kids with intellectual disability, showing the style shift is not just a Down-syndrome quirk.
Boswell et al. (2023) add that easy-going or over-protective styles can lower the child’s self-determination, so loosening rules may carry a skill cost.
Why it matters
You can’t just tell a stressed mom to “be more authoritative.” First measure her stress, then add respite, skill training, or brief mindfulness. When Mom feels supported, she can set kind, consistent limits that help both behavior and long-term independence.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Add a quick parental-stress rating to your intake and give Mom a five-minute breathing or break plan before teaching any new discipline skill.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Effective parenting is vital for a child's development. Although much work has been conducted on parenting typically developing children, little work has examined parenting children with Down syndrome. AIMS: The purpose of the current study was to compare the parenting styles and dimensions in mothers of children with DS and mothers of TD children. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: Thirty-five mothers of children with DS and 47 mothers of TD children completed questionnaires about parenting, parental stress, child behavior problems, and child executive function. OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: We found that mothers of children with DS use an authoritative parenting style less and a permissive parenting style more than mothers of TD children. Additionally, we found that mothers of children with DS use reasoning/induction and verbal hostility less and ignoring misbehavior more than mothers of TD children. All of these differences, except for those of reasoning/induction, were at least partially accounted for by the higher levels of parental stress in the DS group. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Parenting interventions should be focused on reducing parental stress and training mothers to parent under stress in an effort to improve parenting techniques, which would, in theory, improve long-term child outcomes for children with DS.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2017 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2017.06.010