engleski

Changes and Challenges: Differences in occurrence, anticipation and evaluation of major life events between parents of children with disabilities to the matching group of parents of typically developed children

Within hedonic tradition, well-being is defined via constructs such as happiness, positive affect, low negative affect, and satisfaction with life, while eudemonic tradition, stresses positive psychological functioning and human development. While many different factors may influence one's well-being, each time an individual meets a new event, he/she is challenged to adapt. Therefore, the occurrence of various life events, as well as individual's expectation, evaluation and adaptation to those, are important determinants of well-being. Birth and raising of a child with disabilities is stressful event that challenges parent's well-being in many ways. However, results in this area are inconsistent since although many research showed that families with a child with disabilities suffer severe negative impacts, some authors found positive outcomes of parenting a child with difficulties, including positive coping and adaptation. Therefore, a major life event may be perceived differently among families with a child with disabilities, and it is our intention to explore these differences. The aim of this study is to compare parents of children with disabilities to the matching group of parents of typically developed children regarding type of events that happened during the last year, as well as their expectations and evaluations of those events. This study was conducted within the project CRO-WELL: Croatian Longitudinal Study of Well-Being. We identified 41 parents of children with disabilities. Each of them was matched to a very similar individual with typically developed children. Consequently, we obtained two samples where most of the participants were married, employed and lived in a large city. Using online questionnaire we assessed well-being measures and occurrence of various major life events. For each reported event we further assessed participant's anticipation of the event, and his/her evaluation of its positivity/negativity. Studied groups were compared regarding type of events, event evaluation and levels of anticipation. Results show that these groups of parents experience similar life events, while some events did not occur at all. Difference in positive in negative emotions was significantly lower in life events “falling in love” and “friendship” for parents of children with difficulties and they give less significance and more anticipation to nature/household disaster events. Results are interpreted in the framework of the theories of learned helplessness and learned optimism.

major life events, wellbeing, parents of children with difficulties

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