Chronic Childhood Illness: Family Stress in Cystic Fibrosis
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Date
1995
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Publisher
Scientific Publishing House
Abstract
The presence of a chronic and life-threatening illness such as cystic fibrosis has a profound effect on the family. On the one hand the daily stress affects individual family members, the entire family unit, including their responses and coping patterns. On the other hand the coping variables are psychological factors which are decisive in determining how stressors are perceived and how they determine individual and family behavior. The aim of this paper is to investigate the psychological consequences of the child’s illness on mothers in comparison to fathers. In order to achieve this goal, the following issues have been analyzed: 1. The responses to CF diagnosis and sense of burden which reflects the extent of parents stress. 2. Coping strategies according to McCubbin’s approach with special focus on the social support system as the coping resource and on the value system as a set of goals important for decreasing the stress. 30 couples, parents of CF children have been examined. The results show that fathers had been much more burdened by the child’s disease than the mothers and need much more professional assistance. It is important, since chronically ill children learn coping strategies from other family members, the quality of intra familial coping is a critical component of the child's ability to negotiate the stressful demands of disease-related consequences, his ability to socialize with healthy peers, and to function effectively later in life.
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Keywords
cystic fibrosis, psychological aspects of cystic fibrosis, family with a child with cystic fibrosis, stress in a family with cystic fibrosis, mukowiscydoza, psychologiczne aspekty mukowiscydozy, rodzina z dzieckiem z mukowiscydozą, stres w rodzinie z dzieckiem z mukowiscydozą
Citation
"Polish Quarterly of Developmental Psychology", 1995, Vol. 1, nr 1-4, s. 195-205