Personality, coping style and well-being of parents rearing children with developmental disabilities.
Parent personality shapes coping style, and coping style sets the tone for daily well-being.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team gave a survey to parents who raise children with developmental disabilities. They asked how parents cope day to day and how they feel about life.
The survey also measured each parent's personality traits. The goal was to see which traits push parents toward helpful or harmful coping moves.
What they found
Most parents chose problem-focused coping: they looked for real steps to fix issues. Mothers who used positive reappraisal felt better; those who used escape-avoidance felt worse.
Personality mattered. Parents high in neuroticism leaned toward escape-avoidance and reported lower well-being.
How this fits with other research
Snow et al. (2016) asked the same questions with autism-only parents and got the same link: higher neuroticism predicted darker mood. The pattern holds across wider disability groups.
Gray (2006) tracked autism parents for ten years and saw them drop service-seeking while turning to emotion and faith coping. M et al. give the snapshot; E shows the slow shift.
Fahmie et al. (2013) pooled many studies and found parents of kids with autism feel more stress than parents of kids with other delays. M et al. help explain why: personality steers coping, and poor coping boosts stress.
Why it matters
When you meet a new family, ask how they usually handle problems. A parent high in neuroticism may need extra help choosing action steps instead of avoidance. Teach brief reappraisal scripts: "I can't fix the meltdown right now, but I can take data and try after lunch." Small shifts in coping can protect parent mood and keep treatment on track.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Parents with children with developmental disabilities (DD) encounter a variety of stressors associated with rearing their children and must develop effective coping mechanisms in order to adapt successfully to these challenges. Previous research has failed to establish the role of parental individual differences in the reported use of different coping strategies. The current study explores parental personality and whether children with DD were adopted or born into the families and their influence on the coping strategies used by mothers and fathers. METHODS: A total of 97 mother-father dyads rearing at least one child with DD were participants. They narrated stressful situations related to their child and completed the Ways of Coping Questionnaire twice. Data were also collected with regard to personality, depression and subjective well-being (SWB). RESULTS: Both adoptive and birth mothers and fathers used more problem-focused than emotion-focused strategies. Personality factors, Neuroticism especially, were predictive of coping strategy use. Higher levels of Positive Reappraisal were associated with higher levels of SWB, whereas higher levels of Escape-Avoidance were associated with lower levels of SWB, but only for mothers. Results were consistent with a dispositional model of strategy use in that frequency of use was associated with personality characteristics, was consistent over time, and for different children in the same families. Future research should focus on the persistence of the associations between strategy use and well-being and whether they hold true at different stages of the lifespan when coping contexts may change quite dramatically.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2006 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2006.00929.x