Stress Across the Life Course: Long-term Parenting for Adult Children with Disabilities

institute on aging IOA Affiliate Marsha Mailick Seltzer (Vaughan Bascom Professor & Director of the UW-Madison Waisman Center), in close association with Jan S. Greenberg (IOA Affiliate, Professor & Director of the School of Social Work, UW-Madison), studies the challenges of parenting a child with developmental disabilities or mental health problems. These parents face multiple, ongoing stressors, including managing their child’s problematic behavior, dealing with financial burdens for health care, coping with the stigma of disability, grieving over milestones their child may never achieve, and worrying about who will care for their child after their death. There are great diff erences among such parents, with some showing profiles of resilience via the use of positive coping strategies and social support. Parenting of this type allows researchers to test general theories about the mental and physical impacts of long term, chronic stress, including what can cushion us against it. MIDUS (see p. 4) includes a national, random sample of participants of various ages, 10% of whom (434 adults) were found to have children with disabilities, including attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder, autism, Down syndrome, schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, and others. MIDUS allows the comparison of these parents to a group of parents with healthy children who were otherwise similar to the parents of children with disabilities.