Mindfulness for Mothers of Children With Disabilities

March 17, 2023 updated by: Błażej Cieślik, Wroclaw University of Health and Sport Sciences

Mindfulness-Based Online Support Program 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.

Study Overview

Status

Completed

Conditions

Intervention / Treatment

Detailed Description

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.

Study Type

Interventional

Enrollment (Actual)

24

Phase

  • Not Applicable

Contacts and Locations

This section provides the contact details for those conducting the study, and information on where this study is being conducted.

Study Locations

  • Poland
    • Lower Silesia
      • Wroclaw, Lower Silesia, Poland, 51-612
        • Wroclaw University of Health and Sport Sciences
    • Upper Silesi
      • Katowice, Upper Silesi, Poland, 40-007
        • University of Silesia in Katowice
    • Upper Silesia
      • Częstochowa, Upper Silesia, Poland, 42-200
        • Jan Dlugosz University in Czestochowa

Participation Criteria

Researchers look for people who fit a certain description, called eligibility criteria. Some examples of these criteria are a person's general health condition or prior treatments.

Eligibility Criteria

Ages Eligible for Study

  • Child
  • Adult
  • Older Adult

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Genders Eligible for Study

Female

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

  • mother of childern with disabilities

Exclusion Criteria:

  • substance abuse;
  • participation in another therapeutic project or individual psychotherapy;
  • antidepressant treatment.

Study Plan

This section provides details of the study plan, including how the study is designed and what the study is measuring.

How is the study designed?

Design Details

  • Primary Purpose: Treatment
  • Allocation: Randomized
  • Interventional Model: Parallel Assignment
  • Masking: Single

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm
Intervention / Treatment
Experimental: Mindfulness-based teleintervention
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).
Behavioral: 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) 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.
Active Comparator: Usual care intervention
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).
Behavioral: Usual care intervention

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).

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Families in Early Intervention Quality of Life (FEIQoL)
Time Frame: 15 minutes
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).
15 minutes

Secondary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Parental Burnout Measure (PBM-12)
Time Frame: 7 minutes
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).
7 minutes
Self-Compassion Scale (SCS)
Time Frame: 7 minutes
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).
7 minutes
Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10)
Time Frame: 7 minutes
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.
7 minutes
Ego Resilience Scale (ER89)
Time Frame: 7 minutes
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").
7 minutes

Collaborators and Investigators

This is where you will find people and organizations involved with this study.

Sponsor

Wroclaw University of Health and Sport Sciences

Collaborators

University of Silesia in Katowice
Jan Dlugosz University in Czestochowa

Investigators

  • Study Chair: Małgorzata Sekułowicz, Professor, Wroclaw University of Health and Sport Sciences
  • Principal Investigator: Krystyna Boroń-Krupińska, PhD, Wroclaw University of Health and Sport Sciences
  • Principal Investigator: Sylwia Wrona, PhD, University of Silesia in Katowice

Publications and helpful links

The person responsible for entering information about the study voluntarily provides these publications. These may be about anything related to the study.

General Publications

Study record dates

These dates track the progress of study record and summary results submissions to ClinicalTrials.gov. Study records and reported results are reviewed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to make sure they meet specific quality control standards before being posted on the public website.

Study Major Dates

Study Start (Actual)

October 1, 2021

Primary Completion (Actual)

January 30, 2023

Study Completion (Actual)

February 28, 2023

Study Registration Dates

First Submitted

November 9, 2022

First Submitted That Met QC Criteria

November 9, 2022

First Posted (Actual)

November 17, 2022

Study Record Updates

Last Update Posted (Actual)

March 20, 2023

Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria

March 17, 2023

Last Verified

December 1, 2022

More Information

Terms related to this study

Keywords

Additional Relevant MeSH Terms

Other Study ID Numbers

  • 01/2021

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?

NO

Drug and device information, study documents

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated drug product

No

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated device product

No

This information was retrieved directly from the website clinicaltrials.gov without any changes. If you have any requests to change, remove or update your study details, please contact register@clinicaltrials.gov. As soon as a change is implemented on clinicaltrials.gov, this will be updated automatically on our website as well.

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