A Ray of New Hope for the Parents of Children with Intellectual Disability

Abstract

ABSTRACT “Everything has its wonders, including darkness and stillness, and I learn to be satisfied in whatever situation I am in.” Research literature illustrates that parents of children with intellectual impairments are exposed to a variety of stressful life events while caring for their children with intellectual disabilities. The pivotal aim is to determine that the parenting intervention has a meaningful impact on parents’ care of their intellectual disabled child and also to improve the parenting abilities of intellectual developmentally disabled children. It is indeed crucial to strengthen parenting skills through various means or strategies. Thus, the researcher examined numerous parenting practices that can help the parents in instilling positive attitudes to improve their parenting skills so that they can modify their intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDDs) child’s behavioral issues. Researcher has also identified the various strategies and principles to change the inappropriate behavior of IDD child such as acceptance, positive self-beliefs, positive reinforcement, self-efficacy, endurance, consistency, remain calm and be respectful, learn to stand and assertively explore out their feelings, nonjudgmental, and nonpunitive toward their disabled child. Apart from this, behavioral techniques for problematic behavior management such as changing the antecedent, extinction/ignoring, time out, response cost, and overcorrection prove beneficial in making modifications and improvement in child’s behavior. It has been found that parenting skill program brings positive motivation, guidance, and zeal in parents and also enhances personal and parental self-efficacy which further helps to improve the family functioning. In addition to this, parenting intervention helps the parents to realize their own potential to manage their daily life stress, thereby living a happy and successful life with the intellectual disability child. It is estimated that disabilities will cross 10 million by 2022 if appropriate skills are not imparted through training programs.