Parents and Young Mentally Handicapped Children by Helen McConachie

Author:Helen McConachie [McConachie, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, People With Disabilities, Health & Fitness, Children's Health
ISBN: 9781317299387
Google: iaFYCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-01-08T06:01:00+00:00

FATHER-CHILD INTERACTION

Fathers of handicapped children have been even more invisible in parent-child interaction studies than they were in studies of parents’ attitudes and feelings. This may well be a reflection of the workings of services for handicapped children, since detailed research has usually gone hand in hand with intervention. Since services operate largely during weekdays, and mothers are under pressure to be full-time caretakers, fathers are excluded by default.

Of the studies identified in the literature, only two involve a comparison with non-handicapped children’s families, and only one has contrasted triadic with dyadic interaction. Mitchell, W.M. (1980) found that fathers of Down’s syndrome children were very similar to fathers of non-handicapped children in home observations of interaction, except that they were more likely to be found teaching their children (even though the observations were made just prior to the children’s bedtime). A more structured study of play interaction at home with four to seven year old children stressed similarity of mothers and fathers, but noted several differences between handicapped and non-handicapped groupings (Stoneman, Brody and Abbott, 1983). In dyadic interaction, parents of Down’s syndrome children more often adopted teacher and manager roles with their children. The Down’s syndrome children were less contingently responsive to their parents than were the non-handicapped children; however, the Down’s syndrome children were more responsive to fathers’ teaching than to mothers’ in the triadic situation. This was interpreted as fathers’ greater novelty in teaching - the content of their joint activity was not reported, nor was the quality of fathers’ interaction style measured. The parents of Down’s syndrome children were found to be “extremely contingently responsive”, as if they were under more of a pressure to respond since each initiation by the child was felt to be important. However, this may also represent a developmentally appropriate decline in responsiveness by parents of fluent non-handicapped children. In the triadic situation, fathers of Down’s syndrome children and non-handicapped children alike were found to retreat into the observer role or solitary activity, while mothers continued their manager role in much the same way as they had in dyadic interaction.

The other available studies of fathers of mentally handicapped children have contrasted mothers and fathers in play or structured teaching sessions. The general conclusion is of very few significant differences between mothers’ and fathers’ behaviour in interacting with the child. For example, a case study of a four year old language-impaired boy (compared with his non-handicapped cousin) found no evidence of lesser competence of the father in adjusting his speech appropriately to the boy’s level (Cramblit and Siegel, 1977). There have also been three studies of Down’s syndrome children and their parents. Cheseldine (1977) recorded play sessions at home, and found that mothers and fathers differed only on use of expansions of the child’s utterances. Mitchell, D.R. (1976, 1980) observed dyads in a laboratory teaching task and found very few categories on which mothers and fathers differed. These exceptions included greater use of high levels of physical help to the child by fathers (c.

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