Mindfulness for Mothers of Children With Disabilities

Wroclaw University of Health and Sport Sciences

Status: Completed

Conditions: Caregiver Burnout; Parental Burnout

Treatments: Behavioral: Mindfulness and Compassionate Living Course (MCLC); Behavioral: Usual care intervention

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT05620368

01/2021

Details and patient eligibility

About

The main objective of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of an eight-week mindfulness-based teleintervention in improving quality of life, parental burnout, self-compassion, and stress level in mothers of children with disabilities.

Full description

Parenthood is accompanied by significant mental and physical effort accompanied by different sources of long-term stress and encumbrance. The results of this research indicate serious difficulties in the functioning of parents of children with disabilities, such as pain, emotional and physical discomfort, anxiety, depression, and problems resulting from the realization of everyday life activities combined with the care of the child. They indicate how serious this crisis is and how important life constraints it brings to the individual and the social functioning of the family.

A parent's ability to adapt to stressful situations depends on several variables, including an individual's psychological strengths, individual and family resources, and the type of coping strategies utilized. Parental burnout is defined as a syndrome that occurs in response to chronic parental stress. The risk of parental burnout is related to family functioning. In the concept of family as an interactional system, "family adaptability is the degree to which the family is flexible and can regain equilibrium in stressful and challenging situations or environments".

Positive coping styles such as positive perceptions and effective problem-solving skills were associated with successful family adaptation and resilience. Twenty years ago, the concept of mindful parenting was introduced as an alternative to traditional discipline-oriented methods by focusing on the quality of a parent's presence in the parent-child dyad. It focuses on cultivating mindfulness and attunement with the parent's inner experience while interacting with the child, and feeling the full range of emotions related to parenting. Mindful parenting involves cultivating non-judgmental awareness of the unfolding of internal and external experiences in daily life, practicing emotion regulation skills, learning about adaptive responses to distress, and developing a self-compassionate attitude toward one's fallibility, limitations, and suffering.

Compassion- and mindfulness-based interventions (CMBIs) hold promise in supporting parental resilience by enabling adaptive stress appraisal and coping, mindful parenting, and self-compassion. These interventions also aimed to reduce social isolation by increasing the capacity for connections. Perceived social support, an aspect of compassionate behavior, is a potent buffer against stress on health outcomes.

Therefore, the main objective of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of an eight-week mindfulness-based teleintervention in improving quality of life, parental burnout, self-compassion, and stress level in mothers of children with disabilities. The investigators hypothesize that the mindfulness-based teleintervention compared with the control group will lead to (A) an improvement in positive aspects of mental health, including quality of life, and self-compassion, and (B) a reduction in psychopathological variables including perceived stress and parental burnout.

Enrollment: 24 patients

Sex: Female

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• mother of childern with disabilities

Exclusion criteria

• substance abuse;
• participation in another therapeutic project or individual psychotherapy;
• antidepressant treatment.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

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24 participants in 2 patient groups

Mindfulness-based teleintervention

Experimental group

Description:

8-week Mindfulness and Compassionate Living Course (MCLC). The course will be held online (using the Zoom platform) with weekly sessions lasting 2.5 hours each, as well as a day of silent practice (mini-retreat of 4 hours).

Treatment:

Behavioral: Mindfulness and Compassionate Living Course (MCLC)

Usual care intervention

Active Comparator group

Description:

The facility provides psychological support for parents as needed and at the request of the parent. Support includes individual support of a psychologist (1h / week), consultation with a teacher (special pedagogue and early school education teacher, 1h / week), individual consultation with observation of a child with a Venetian mirror (1h / week).

Treatment:

Behavioral: Usual care intervention