Culture, coping and adjustment of parents with children with disability
MENA Dubai 2003 Abstract
Author Helen Kothrakis
Copy The presence of a child with a disability potentates different types of stress that poses a series of adaptive tasks that require coping.

Existing theoretical and empirical works in the field have examined the centrality of parental coping in the face of the challenge of caring for a child with disability. However, little attention has been paid to the centrality cultural diversity may play in ameliorating or hindering the coping capacity of parents faced with the challenge of child disability. Culture is central in the underlying latent constructs that affect behavior as transmitted from one generation to another. The examination of these underlying latent constructs provide a window of opportunity to examine the underlying mechanisms that are manifested as communication patterns; affective styles; values defining and regulating personal control which denote ethnic or racial differences. Race and ethnicity is also discussed in terms of the interactive effect of the socio-economic and socio-political as an influence on the coping capacities of parents caring for a child with disability.

The theoretical structure for looking at parents who have a child with disability is discussed in terms of an Adlerian perspective. By employing an Adlerian approach, the paper shifts attention from the focus on parent's initial reactions and traditional grief theory as a function of their personality, to the range of emotions and coping behaviors accompanying the life cycle of parenting a child with a disability, as a function of life styles, as developed by Adler's Individual psychology. In adopting an Adlerian approach, four contexts are important which continue to redefine the coping process both in terms of the child and the dyadic relationship. These are (a) the Life Style of each parent, which determines the development of Social Interest; (b) the manifestation of disability; (c) the coping; and well-being of the parental dyad and (d) the cultural response to disability.