Optimism And Stress

R. Hill, (1949) used the term crisis precipitating event and stressor to mean a situation for which the family has had little or no prior precipitation and must therefore be viewed as problematic. He asserted that crises-precipitating events affect families differently based on hardships that accompany them. Hill defined hardships as complications of a stressor that demand competencies (resources) from the family. Whether or not a stressor led to hardship (and to what extent) determined whether a family defined a stressor positively or negatively. According to the ABCX formula the crisis – precipitating event or stressor interacted with the family’s crisis – meeting resources.

B. The Family Crisis – Meeting Resources Hill

Mothers with high optimism engaged in more positive parenting, showing more affection and love to the child (Ellingsen et al., 2013). In a quantitative study in South-eastern Michigan involving 127 parents or primary caregivers (96 females), a regression analysis established a significant relationship between optimism and stress which suggests that having an optimistic personal disposition is very important for parents to avoid the stress associated with providing care to their child. The authors speculated that having a positive outlook on life allows caregivers to see the benefit and joy of having a child and to avoid dwelling on the potential negative aspects of parenting an individual with an intellectual disability (Peer & Hillman, 2012a). Similarly, Scharer et al.,( 2009) who studied mothers of children under 12 years with various mental and developmental disorders interacting with web-based or Telephone-based support nurses reported that mothers found positive and affirming characteristics in their child despite the difficulties and regardless of the emotional strains felt, the joys they felt with their children

Of particular interest is the broad categorization by Algood, Harris, and Hong, (2013) in their ecological systems analysis. They classified factors that influence parenting success into ‘‘micro- (parenting practices, parent-child relations), meso-(caregivers' marital relations, religious social support), and macro-systems (cultural variations, racial and ethnic disparities, health care delivery system)’’ p. 128. In partial support of the micro system factors, Nurullah, (2013) using interpretive description of qualitative data, reports that some parents change their style of parenting from traditional to a unique style to accommodate the needs of their child with a the disability. That study emphasized that stress may result if the parenting style adopted is inappropriate in containing the child’s behaviour characteristics (Nurullah 2013). Similarly, some quantitative studies have identified significant evidence of association between each of maternal adaptive or coping behaviour and child behaviour difficulties and the stress experienced by the mother (C. Hill & Rose, 2009; Norizan & Shamsuddin, 2010). For instance, mothers with higher levels of parenting satisfaction, [which was measured by the Parenting Sense of Competence Scale (PSOC-S)] had lower levels of parenting stress in Hill and Rose’s study while maternal depression and lack