Mental health and positive change among Japanese mothers of children with intellectual disabilities: Roles of sense of coherence and social capital.
Helping moms build neighborhood trust and a clear life story improves their mental health and outlook.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Miyako and colleagues asked Japanese moms of kids with intellectual disability or autism to fill out surveys. They measured three things: how strong the moms felt their neighborhood stuck together (social capital), how much life felt understandable and manageable (sense of coherence), and their mental health plus any positive changes they saw in themselves.
What they found
Moms who scored high on sense of coherence and social capital also reported better mental health and more personal growth. Both factors worked together: feeling life made sense and having trusted neighbors predicted lower stress and more upside.
How this fits with other research
The finding lines up with Sawyer et al. (2014) and Koegel et al. (2014), two earlier surveys that used the same Double ABCX model and showed sense of coherence buffers stress in parents of kids with ASD.
Pisula et al. (2010) looked at the flip side: parents of autistic children scored lower on sense of coherence than parents of typical kids. Kimura et al. (2016) extends that work by showing boosting the trait is linked to real gains.
Kuhn et al. (2018) seemed to contradict the value of social ties; they found only stressful connections hurt moms, while strong ties did not help. Miyako’s survey suggests the quality of neighborhood trust still matters, pointing to a difference between counting ties and feeling true community support.
Why it matters
You can’t change a diagnosis, but you can strengthen a mom’s sense that life is coherent and her neighborhood has her back. Start sessions by mapping her trusted people and community assets. Link her to parent groups, faith centers, or local recreation programs. Each new reliable contact is a dose of social capital that may lift mood and resilience for years.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We investigated predictors of mental health and positive change among mothers of children with intellectual disabilities in Japan based on the concept of the Double ABCX model. We used variables of having a child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and dissatisfaction with systems as stressors, availability of social support and social capital (SC) as existing resources, sense of coherence (SOC) as appraisal of the stressor, and mental health and positive change as adaptation. A self-administered questionnaire was distributed to 10 intellectual disability-oriented special needs schools in Tokyo, and obtained 613 responses from mothers of children under age 20 attending these schools. The results showed that our Double ABCX model explained 46.0% of the variance in mothers' mental health and 38.9% of the variance in positive change. The most powerful predictor of this model was SOC, and SC may be directly and indirectly related to maternal mental health and positive change through mothers' SOC. Increasing opportunity for interaction between neighbors and family of children with disabilities may be one effective way to enhance SOC through SC. Since maternal SOC, SC, mental health, and positive change were significantly correlated with each other, synergy among these elements could be expected.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2016 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2016.07.009