Beliefs About Maternal Roles and Developmental Benefits in Parent -Infant Play Contexts: Learning From Taiwanese Mothers of Children With Down Syndrome

155 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2001.Using a structured interview format with 16 mothers of children with Down syndrome, the results revealed that, like the Taiwanese mothers of normally developing children from our previous study, the mothers in this study stressed cognitive, emotional, and physical outcomes. Mothers in this study also valued a range of maternal roles in supporting these outcomes, such as facilitator, caregiver, director, and entertainer roles. However, the relative emphases placed by the mothers of children with Down syndrome on benefits and roles within categories differed from the mothers in our previous study. In responding to their children's disabilities, mothers in this study placed more equal value on the emotional and physical benefits, with the latter associated primarily with their children's motor development and health. They also placed relatively greater emphasis on facilitator and caregiver roles in helping their children to achieve these benefits. After categorizing the mothers into two groups (pessimistic and optimistic) based on their descriptions of their children's characteristics and their perceptions of their own influence on their child's development, the findings indicated that the ways in which mothers interacted with their children differed as a function of how they perceived their children's disability related characteristics. The present study also found that individual differences, such as the level of maternal education, have a relation to perceptions of parental influence. Implications are drawn for early intervention.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD