Progress in social-independent functioning of young people with Down's syndrome.
Teaching moms to cope and connect predicts bigger teen independence gains than cognitive scores alone.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Sturmey et al. (1996) followed 54 teens with Down's syndrome for five years. They tracked how well the kids dressed, cooked, rode buses, and handled money on their own.
The team also asked moms how they coped with stress and how many friends or relatives gave help. They wanted to see which things predicted bigger jumps in daily-living skills.
What they found
Every teen got better at daily tasks, but some shot ahead faster. The teens whose moms used active coping and had lots of social support gained twice as many independence points.
Surprise: the mom's coping style and support network beat the teen's own IQ score as a predictor.
How this fits with other research
Alon (2019) looked at moms of kids with ASD and DS. Social support boosted growth for ASD moms only, showing the link is stronger when autism is in the mix.
Gerow et al. (2021) proved you can raise daily-living skills through telehealth parent coaching. Their remote method gives you a tool to act on the 1996 coping finding today.
Vassos et al. (2016) found parent expectations, not coping, drove adult outcomes in ASD. Together these papers say: boost both expectations and coping for the biggest payoff.
Why it matters
You can't swap out a child's IQ, but you can train parents to cope better and to build their support circle. Add a brief coping-skills module and a social-support map to every parent-training plan for teens with Down's syndrome. The pay-off is faster real-world independence.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Start each parent meeting with a two-minute coping check and hand them a local support-group list.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
The progress over a 5-year period in the social-independent functioning of 96 older children and teenagers with Down's syndrome was examined. A significant increase in scores on the Self-Sufficiency Index was found, with considerable individual variability. Path analysis was used to trace the factors associated with current levels of self-sufficiency and the degree of change over time. Earlier level of cognitive development was the strongest predictor of progress in self-sufficiency, but family factors were also important, particularly mothers' strategies for coping with child problems and mothers' levels of social support. For a small number of children with the lowest developmental level, family factors were less important as their self-sufficiency was more strongly limited by their severe disability. The results suggest that interventions aimed at changing maternal coping strategies and supplementing social support may benefit the development of social-independent functioning in young people with Down's syndrome.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 1996 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.1996.tb00601.x