Mindfulness for Mothers of Children With Disabilities

The main objective of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of an eight-week mindfulness-based teleintervention in improving quality of life, parental burnout, self-compassion, and stress level in mothers of children with disabilities.

Parenthood is accompanied by significant mental and physical effort accompanied by different sources of long-term stress and encumbrance. The results of this research indicate serious difficulties in the functioning of parents of children with disabilities, such as pain, emotional and physical discomfort, anxiety, depression, and problems resulting from the realization of everyday life activities combined with the care of the child. They indicate how serious this crisis is and how important life constraints it brings to the individual and the social functioning of the family. A parent's ability to adapt to stressful situations depends on several variables, including an individual's psychological strengths, individual and family resources, and the type of coping strategies utilized. Parental burnout is defined as a syndrome that occurs in response to chronic parental stress. The risk of parental burnout is related to family functioning. In the concept of family as an interactional system, "family adaptability is the degree to which the family is flexible and can regain equilibrium in stressful and challenging situations or environments". Positive coping styles such as positive perceptions and effective problem-solving skills were associated with successful family adaptation and resilience. Twenty years ago, the concept of mindful parenting was introduced as an alternative to traditional discipline-oriented methods by focusing on the quality of a parent's presence in the parent-child dyad. It focuses on cultivating mindfulness and attunement with the parent's inner experience while interacting with the child, and feeling the full range of emotions related to parenting. Mindful parenting involves cultivating non-judgmental awareness of the unfolding of internal and external experiences in daily life, practicing emotion regulation skills, learning about adaptive responses to distress, and developing a self-compassionate attitude toward one's fallibility, limitations, and suffering. Compassion- and mindfulness-based interventions (CMBIs) hold promise in supporting parental resilience by enabling adaptive stress appraisal and coping, mindful parenting, and self-compassion. These interventions also aimed to reduce social isolation by increasing the capacity for connections. Perceived social support, an aspect of compassionate behavior, is a potent buffer against stress on health outcomes. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of an eight-week mindfulness-based teleintervention in improving quality of life, parental burnout, self-compassion, and stress level in mothers of children with disabilities. The investigators hypothesize that the mindfulness-based teleintervention compared with the control group will lead to (A) an improvement in positive aspects of mental health, including quality of life, and self-compassion, and (B) a reduction in psychopathological variables including perceived stress and parental burnout.

parental burnout, meditation, mindfulness, self-compassion, stress level, parents of children with disability, autism, quality of life

8-week Mindfulness and Compassionate Living Course (MCLC). The course will be held online (using the Zoom platform) with weekly sessions lasting 2.5 hours each, as well as a day of silent practice (mini-retreat of 4 hours).

The facility provides psychological support for parents as needed and at the request of the parent. Support includes individual support of a psychologist (1h / week), consultation with a teacher (special pedagogue and early school education teacher, 1h / week), individual consultation with observation of a child with a Venetian mirror (1h / week).

The course will be held online (using the Zoom platform) with weekly sessions lasting 2.5 hours each, as well as a day of silent practice (mini-retreat of 4 hours) between sessions 6 and 7. On the structural level, every course session consists of four elements: (1) an educational input, (2) mindfulness and compassion exercises (eg, sitting meditation, body scan, mindful walking, self-compassion break), (3) a reflection of one's practice (inquiry), (4) and home assignments.

If necessary, psychological support is organized at the request of the parent. Support includes individual support of a psychologist (1h / week), consultation with a teacher (special pedagogue and early school education teacher, 1h / week), individual consultation with observation of a child with a Venetian mirror (1h / week).

Families in Early Intervention Quality of Life (FEIQoL) questionnaire will be used for assessing the quality of life. Participants answer 40 items using a five-point Likert scale (1, 'poor' to 5, 'excellent') in the aspects of family life (24 items), and child's functioning (16 items).

Parental Burnout will be assessed with the Parental Burnout Measure (PBM-12) measures parental burnout in two dimensions: exhaustion and helplessness. Both dimensions are measured as a sum of 6 items, answered on a 4-point Likert scale (1, 'never' to 4, 'very often'). Fully satisfactory internal reliability indicators (Cronbach's alpha) were reached by all burnout measures - PBM-12 total score (.90), exhaustion subscale (.88), and helplessness sub-scale (.80).

To assess self-compassion we will use a polish adaptation of the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS). Items on the SCS use a five-point Likert scale to measure conformity (1, 'almost never' to 5, 'almost always'). The final SCS score ranges from 26 to 130. A higher score indicates a higher level of self-compassion. This scale has good internal consistency and test-retest reliability (.93).

The 10-item Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10) will be used to measure self-reported stress. This scale includes 10 questions, with answers ranked using a 5-point Likert scale, and assesses stressful experiences and responses to stress over the previous 4 weeks. Scores range from 0 to 56, with higher scores indicating higher levels of perceived stress.

The Ego-Resiliency Scale (ER89) measures the construct of ego-resiliency, which refers to the dynamic capacity of an individual to modify a characteristic level of ego-control, in either direction, as a function of the demand characteristics of the environmental context, so as to preserve or enhance system equilibration. It consists of 14 items, each responded to on a 4-point scale (1 = "does not apply at all"; 2 = "applies slightly, if at all"; 3 = "applies somewhat"; and 4 = "applies very strongly").

Inclusion Criteria: mother of childern with disabilities Exclusion Criteria: substance abuse; participation in another therapeutic project or individual psychotherapy; antidepressant treatment.

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