Perceived Stress, Mental Well-Being and Coping on Parents of Disabled Children from Mainstream and Special Schools

Abstract

Raising children with special needs increases the level of family stress and undoubtedly affects the mental well-being of its members. Parents' ability to adapt to this challenge, which causes stress and various unpleasant emotions, will have an effect both on them and on the children. We hypothesized that perceived stress is a significant predictor for parents’ mental well-being and that this relationship is moderated by different copying strategies used by them. Moreover, we hypothesized that the type of school in which children are enrolled predicts the level of stress reported by the parents. 202 parents of children with disabilities in special schools and mainstream schools, aged between 21 and 66 years old, completed a questionnaire to measure stress levels, mental well-being and the coping strategies used by them. Regression and moderation analyses were conducted. Parental stress was a negative predictor of mental well-being, and problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping were moderators of the relationship between the two variables, with lower levels of stress and higher levels of mental well-being for the use of these strategies. Avoidant coping did not represent a moderator in this relationship, being correlated with higher levels of parental stress. Children’ parents in special education have experienced higher levels of stress than children’ parents in mainstream schools. Findings suggest that the way parents of disabled children manage to cope with the stressors influence their mental well-being, offering support in understanding this phenomenon and setting objectives of psycho-emotional intervention for parents.