A comparative Study about quality of life in Mothers of children with cerebral palsy, mental retardation and mothers of normal children

Quality of Life (QOL) is influenced by diseases and threatening conditions of the healthy situations. Parents of disabled children especially their mothers, tolerate lots of physical, spiritual and psychological stress. This study was aimed to determine the QOL of mothers of children with cerebral palsy, mental retardation and normal children to find out the effect of children’s disability on QOL of their mothers. This analytic cross sectional study was conducted in Tehran and the sampling method was based on accessible population. At this study, 300 mothers including 100 mothers of children with cerebral palsy,100 mothers of children with mental retardation and 100 mothers of normal children who were living in Tehran, filled up the WHOQOL-BREF (World Health Organization Quality Of Life- BREF) questionnaire. This questionnaire consisted of 26 questions in four domains including physical health, psychological, social relationships and environment. The data analysis were done by SPSS-16 software using Kolmogrov Smironov, Analyze of Variance, Tucky’s Post Hoc, Kruskal Wallis and mann-whitney U Tests. The mean age of mothers was 30.1 years (SD=5.2).The educational status of the mothers was as following:(24.3 % elementary educations, 52.3 % diploma and 23.3% university education). There were significant differences in all domains of QOL among mothers of healthy children with both mothers of children with cerebral palsy and mental retardation (p<0.001) but no significant difference was observed between QOL of mothers of mentally retarded and cerebral palsied children (p>0.05). According to the results, clinicians and health policy makers must focus more on QOL of the mothers of disabled children in their programs especially in environmental accommodation such as establishing appropriate transportation system to meet the needs of disabled children. Supportive organizations such as welfare and social support organizations should concentrate more to support the mothers of disabled children.Psychological and social services such as social working and psychological consultation in rehabilitation centers should be empowered.