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Marladaptive Coping Strategies

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the culture and contextual setting in which parents are living and parenting is critical for successful interventions (Cervantes, Leininger & Kalil, 2014).
Add social circumstances such as neighborhood violence and housing instability, and parental stress can quickly increase (Vernon, Paters, Willoughby, & Koonce, 2012).
Parents practice various coping strategies in response to stress. Coping strategies can be considered adaptive or maladaptive (that is, healthy or unhealthy), but as already stated, this assessment depends on the situation. Examples of coping strategies generally considered to be maladaptive include self-blame, substance abuse, avoidance, and denial (Friedman & Billick, 2014). These maladaptive coping strategies can adversely …show more content…

For example, Hastings and his colleagues (2005) discovered positive coping strategies to be associated with lower levels of depression in parents of children with epilepsy. Coping strategies associated with reduced stress for parents are organized into two categories: primary control coping and secondary control coping (Band & Weisz). Primary control coping includes intentional efforts to manage a stressful situation efforts such as problem solving, taking a deep breath, and managing difficult emotions, i.e., emotional regulation. Parents who use problem-solving skills experience less parental stress. For example, a parent who lists her financial obligations for the upcoming month in order of due date or priority probably feels clearer about which obligations are necessities and which are less needed (Bushman & Peacock, …show more content…

For example, Barakat, (2007) found that greater disease-related parenting stress at baseline in caregivers of children with sickle cell disease was associated with greater disease severity and more frequent health care utilization 1 year later. Given its significance, a number of investigators have examined parenting stress; however, this important literature is not well integrated. A comprehensive, cross-illness systematic review has yet to be conducted. An analysis of this nature increases understanding of parenting stress, highlights gaps in the literature and future directions for research, and may inform the development of evidence based interventions for reducing parenting stress that can be used across chronic illness populations (Barakat,

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