THE EFFECT OF HAVING A CHILD WITH HEARING LOSS ON PARENTS

AbstractIt is very important to examine the social and psychological problems of parents with hearingimpaired children in a multidimensional way. Intervention and education programs should begiven to the child with effective and correct methods in order to carry out the service. The mainpurpose of our research is to evaluate the caregiving burden, self-efficacy and resilience skillsof parents with children with hearing aids (HA) or cochlear implants (CI) by appropriate scales,and to compare the findings from parents of children using amplification and those with normalhearing. Participants of the study were applied to Ankara University Medical Faculty İbni SinaHospital, Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Audiology, Balance, Speech DisordersDiagnosis and Rehabilitation Unit. Three groups were formed as parents of children withnormal hearing (NH) hearing aid user (HAU) or cochlear implant user (CIU). There are a totalof 60 parents in these three groups as HAU (n=20), CIU (n=20) and (NH=20). The ParentalSelf-Efficacy Scale (PSES), Zarit Care Burden Scale (ZCBS), and Brief PsychologicalResilience Scale (BPRS) were applied to parents. There was no statistically significantrelationship between the parents mean PSES scores according to the groups (p>0.05). It wasfound that the ZCBS and BPRS values of the HA and CI groups were statistically significantlylower than the control group (p<0.05). It was observed that there was a moderate (r=0.564;p<0.05) significant and positive correlation between the PSES score and the BPRS score for CIgroup. In the light of the findings of our study we thought that family-centered multidisciplinaryprograms to be planned with the inclusion of parents of children with hearing aids or cochlearimplants could improve the quality of life of the child and the family.Keywords: Cochlear Implant, Hearing, Hearing aid, Parent, Psychology