Promotion of Well-being, Resilience and Stress Management (POWER): An intervention program for mothers of children with intellectual disability: A pilot study

Pages:294-299
Jiju George Arakkathara and Lucila O. Bance (The Graduate School, University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines)

Stress related to the parenting of children with intellectual disabilities often leads to emotional burn out, physical exhaustion and social isolation. In Indian context and culture, mothers are more affected with the disability of the child. It adversely affects their psychological well-being. Since parental stress, resilience and well-being are inter connected development of resilience by strengthening the protective factors will help to alleviate the impact of parental stress and thus enhance well-being. This research attempts the Development and Implementation of the Intervention Program: Promotion of Well-being, Resilience and Stress management (POWER) among Mothers of children with Intellectual Disability. It has the theoretical basis on Transactional theory of Stress, PERMA Model of Well-being, Middle range theory of Resilience and Mindfulness-based cognitive theory. The assessment tools used are Parental Stress Scale (PSS), Ryff’s Scale of Psychological Well-being (RSPW) and Connor Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC). Mixed research method particularly sequential exploratory design is used in this a study. The first phase of the study is the development and evaluation of the intervention applying descriptive research method and the second phase is testing the efficacy of the intervention using Solomon Four Group Research Design. The intervention was subjected to expert validation by seven inter disciplinary experts and feasibility study was conducted among Ten(10) mothers who were in moderate level of parental stress and low level of well-being and resilience. Results of the pilot study showed significant decrease in the parental stress and remarkable increase in the resilience and well-being level of the participants.