Parenting of children with borderline to mild intellectual disability

Raising children with borderline to mild intellectual disability (BMID) may cause parenting stress, especially when the child with BMID has psychosocial problems. To improve support, it is important to have a better understanding of the effectiveness of interventions to reduce problems in raising such children and of the problems these parents are dealing with. Therefore, the aim of this thesis was to assess the effectiveness of the parenting support program Stepping Stones Triple P (SSTP). Furthermore, we aimed to obtain more insight in child psychosocial problems and the need for parenting support among parents of children aged 5-12 with BMID. SSTP, part of the Australian Triple P – Positive Parenting Programme, aims to prevent and reduce behavioural, emotional and developmental problems in children with a disability by enhancing the knowledge, skills and confidence of parents. We found that the advantages of SSTP over Care as Usual (CAU) were limited in the short term and lacked in the long term. Furthermore, many parents stopped with the SSTP intervention prematurely. The latter indicates that SSTP did not fully suit the needs of many parents of a child with BMID even though overall satisfaction with SSTP was pretty high. In two separate cross-sectional studies we found that parenting stress was associated with both a need for parenting support and the child’s psychosocial problems. The results of the studies reported in this thesis show that parents meet many difficulties and challenges in raising a child with BMID and psychosocial problems. Many parents are in need of support but as such SSTP has no convincing advantages compared to CAU. Difficulties are still present, so there is a considerable potential to further improve the support of these parents