Child Rearing Stress and Parenting Style in Mothers of Children with Learning Disabilities - From the Viewpoint of "Understandability of Disabilities"

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The present study was conducted to investigate the effect of knowing that their children have learning disabilities upon child rearing style and stresses of mothers. The children were five or six years old who either were diagnosed to have learning disabilities (LD group) or had no opportunity to consult a doctor in spite of having characteristics of learning disabilities (LDS group : LD suspect group). Another group of mothers who have children without learning disabilities (NLD group) were included. Mothers of these three groups completed a child rearing stress scale and a child rearing style scale. The former one comprised 16 categories such as "how to bring up the child", "the child's problem behavior out of home", "the neighborhood's and the community's understanding of this child's disorders," and the total number of items were 84. Each item required to respond as "YES (1 point)" or "NO (0 point)." The latter scale had 8 categories such as overinterfering, strict, overprotecting, and so on. This scale had 72 items and each of which required to respond on a four-point Likert scale, from 1 (Never) to 4 (Most of the time).The result showed that the average category scores of "interaction between mother and this child" of LD and LDS groups were significantly higher than NLD group and the difference between LD and LDS did not differ. Percentage of mothers who showed overinterfering style were high in order of LD, LDS, and NLD. LD group differed significantly from NLD. Mothers of LDS group were more strict than the other two groups. It was concluded that mothers who have children with learning disabilities are more stressful in child rearing but diagnosis of LD are useful to prevent mothers from taking too strict child rearing style.