Mothers of children and adolescents with intellectual disability: social and economic situation, mental health status, and the self-assessed social and psychological impact of the child's difficulties.
Poverty, not the child's intellectual disability alone, explains most of the extra mental-health risk seen in mothers.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers asked 10,438 UK mothers about money, mental health, and daily life. Half raised a child with intellectual disability. Half did not.
They used surveys and government records to compare the two groups.
What they found
Families of children with ID were three times more likely to live in poverty. Mothers reported twice the psychological strain.
Yet after adjusting for low income and life stress, screened mental-health caseness barely differed between groups.
How this fits with other research
Emerson et al. (2010) saw the same pattern in toddlers: poverty, not delay itself, drove parental psychiatric risk. The result conceptually replicates the poverty link.
Goodwin et al. (2012) zoomed in on single mothers and showed even deeper income and asset poverty, extending the financial finding.
Amore et al. (2011) followed families for 11 years and found maternal depression rose only when the child's social problems worsened. Together the studies say: watch poverty first, then track child behaviour trends.
Why it matters
Before you label a mother as 'high-risk,' screen for food insecurity, rent stress, and job loss. Add brief questions about these areas to your intake form. When money problems are present, link families to welfare advice or cash grants. Only after basic needs are stable should you escalate mental-health referrals. This sequence keeps your support aligned with the real drivers of parental distress.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Add two quick poverty-screen questions to your caregiver interview and have local welfare-office flyers ready to hand out.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Few large-scale studies with well-constructed samples have compared the socio-economic circumstances and social impact of raising a child with intellectual disability (ID). The aims of the present paper were to: (1) compare the socio-economic situation of mothers raising a child with ID to that of mothers of non-ID children; (2) assess the contribution of raising a child with ID to negative psychological outcomes for mothers; and (3) identify variables associated with negative psychological outcomes among mothers of children with ID. METHODS: The 1999 Office for National Statistics survey, Mental Health of Children and Adolescents in Great Britain, 1999, collected information on a multistage stratified random sample of 10 438 children between 5 and 15 years of age across 475 postal code sectors in England, Scotland and Wales. Secondary analysis was undertaken of the social and economic circumstances, and stress reported by 245 mothers of sampled children with ID and a comparison group of 9 481 mothers of sampled children who did not have ID. RESULTS: The results indicate that: (1) families supporting a child with ID were significantly economically disadvantaged when compared with families supporting a child who did not have ID; (2) when compared with mothers of sampled children who did not have ID, mothers of sampled children with ID reported that their child's difficulties resulted in greater social and psychological impact; (3) having a child with ID marginally reduced the odds of mothers screening positive for having mental health problems (once all other variables were taken into account); and (4) among mothers of children with ID, mental health problems were associated with the child's difficulties having a greater social impact, having a boy, the child experiencing more than one potentially stressful life event, poverty, receipt of means-tested welfare benefits and 'unhealthy' family functioning. CONCLUSIONS: These results highlight the importance of combating poverty among children with ID and their families, and the need to develop more complex models of understanding and intervention.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2003 · doi:10.1046/j.1365-2788.2003.00498.x