Parental Needs: A Case Study

Parental needs

A child with disability may influence their parents positively or negatively. For instance, a gifted child may influence their parents positively, whereas a child with other or physical disabilities could be otherwise. In United States, the approximate cost for a lifetime health care for a person with CP is USD 921,000 (NINDS, 2003). Therefore cost of therapy and treatment would have an impact to families with low financial resources. Moreover a mother would probably leave the workforce to attend their child’s needs. Together, as a result of these may increase financial and psychological strain in the families. A study by Almasri et al. (2014) found that in a family with child diagnosed with CP needed the family needs the highest.

Moreover, given the traditional Chinese culture, some families believe that the disabilities of a child are the consequences of something that the mother or her family has done (Holroyd, 2003). This could have a great impact on the families, especially on the mothers where they might take in the blame. Hastings (2002) proposed a model by Oliver (1995) implicated that parents and children reciprocally influence other. That is parenting stress results to children’s negative outcomes such as behavioural issues thus affecting parent-child interactions. Therefore it is imperative that teachers understand the source of stress of parents with children with disabilities.

Support, Strategies and Educational Consideration

Using the Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model of human development (1994), the nurturing of every child occurs in the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem and marcosystem. Therefore it is not any difference for a child with disabilities where all four systems play its own role to help children in need. Participation is the main goal of intervention as schools, communities and parents in collaboration need to resolve the issues around the individuals in need.

Moreover in 2010 and 2011, the approximate number of disabled children received early intervention was 5,982 (Social Welfare Department, 2011). According to Resch, Benz, and Elliott (2012), social support and community resources had bigger effects on parent’s well-being. Moreover a recent study by Ki and Joanne (2014) reported that attending with their child to Early Education Training Centre (H.K.) was least stressful to parents partially due to that the effectiveness of the intervention and most due to having opportunities to interact with the parents. These centres may provide parents as a platform for mutual support to each other, thus reducing stress of accompanying their children to training sessions. Therefore in order to help parents to have more chances to interact with other parents, government and organisations should maximise the capacity of these