Predicting Parenting Stress in Mothers of Children with Disabilities Is Based on the Purpose in Life and Mental Disabilities

Exceptional children could threaten physical and mental health of their mothers. The rate of family vulnerability against that is high and caused severe mental health problems for a family. Parent awareness of their child's disability cause miss all of their dreams and hopes, and family problems starts. These problems may affect usual tasks of parent with child's treatment programs, emotional adjustment to different situations of child, spending much time on determining treatment, providing home care, addressing school problems, and dealing with disabled child's behavior problems. This can affect the life quality of mothers and children. Therefore, the objective of this study was to predict the parenting stress based on meaning of life and resilience in mothers of children with intellectual disability in the city of Urmia. The method of study was to correlational type of descriptive study. The study population consisted of 654 mothers of all children studying in exceptional schools in the Urmia city in academic year 2015-2016, which 208 mothers were selected from four schools using convenience sampling method. In this regard, the meaning of life questionnaire (PIL) of Krambaf and Maholick, parent stress questionnaire (PSI), and Connor and Davidson resilience questionnaire were used. Validity and reliability of the questionnaires have been approved. In order to respond the hypotheses, Pearson correlation coefficient and multiple linear regression through SPSS software were used. First, the pre-assumptions of multiple linear regression were investigated and results showed that there was no problem to use regression. Based on the results obtained, the correlation coefficient between the meaning of life and resilience and stress was obtained 0.815 and 0.568, respectively. In other words, the relationship between meaning of life and resilience and parenting was reverse. In addition, based on multiple linear regression results, meaning of life explains about 65% parenting stress changes and resilience explains about 12% of the parenting stress changes. Based on results obtained, it was concluded that as meaning in the life of mothers with exceptional children was higher, behavioral disorders of mothers reduce and thus the stress of mothers due to presence of disabled and exceptional children will reduce significantly. In addition, as resilience of mothers was higher, they could cope with parenting stress and it will have positive consequences. Therefore, according to the obtained results, it is recommended for education organization to hold educational workshops where the strategies to cope with stress are educated. Finally, it is recommended for education organization to take step in order to teach the concepts of resilience and the meaning of life that have significant impact on reducing the parenting stress of mothers with exceptional children.