The Lived Experiences of Mothers of Children with Physical and Mental Disabilities: A Meta-Synthesis Study

In Iranian Islamic culture, one of the most important duties of mothers is to take care of their children. Caring for a child with a mental or physical disability is fraught with challenges. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to review the lived experiences of mothers with children with physical and mental disabilities.

This study was performed by a qualitative approach and document analysis using meta-synthesis method to examine 13 articles related to the seven-step method of Sandlowski and Barros. The stages of this research included preparing the research question, reviewing the texts systematically, searching and selecting appropriate texts, extracting textual information, analyzing and combining qualitative findings, quality control, and presenting the findings.

Dimensions and categories included individual dimensions (personal education and knowledge, emotions, spirituality, defense mechanisms, personal life) and social dimensions (social stigmas, social supports).

The findings of the present study revealed that mothers with disabled children experience many painful experiences and psychosocial concerns about caring for their disabled child. These findings highlight the need for specialized support for mothers during the first years of a disabled child's birth and beyond, and encourage readers and professionals to make each of these categories a potential therapeutic goal, and to strengthen mothers' strengths in resilience, and in this way prevent the damage they face.