Parents’ Marital Context And Adjustment In Children With Intellectual Disabilities
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2023
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University of Hawaii at Manoa
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Parents’ marital context, or the quality of their marital relationships and marital transitions across time, appears to affect emotional adjustment for typically developing children. However, little research has examined the impact of both marital quality and marital transitions on children’s development of adaptive skills, especially for children with intellectual disabilities. The current study examined how parents’ marital quality, status, and transitions over a 14-year period were related to behavior problems and adaptive behavior in children (n = 153, age 6 to 18 at the first wave of measurement) with mild or moderate intellectual disability, using parent reports at four time points. Parent’s marital quality, status, and experience of divorce or remarriage were considered at the start and the end of the study period. It was predicted that being happily married, as opposed to being unhappily married or single, would predict children’s concurrent and future lower levels of behavior problems and greater adaptive behavior. The experience of marital transitions was hypothesized to predict greater behavior problems and lower adaptive behavior skills at the final wave of measurement. Being unhappily married, single, or experiencing a marital transition was also hypothesized to predict greater growth in behavior problems and less growth in adaptive behavior over the course of the study. Multiple linear regression and multi-level modeling analyses were used. Being in a happily married family predicted children’s concurrent and future lower levels of behavior problems and greater adaptive behavior skills. Marital satisfaction was inconsistently related to rate of change in outcomes, but children in happily married families generally showed better adjustment across all time points. Marital transitions were not associated with behavior problems, but were associated with some aspects of adaptive behavior. These results provide evidence for the likely importance of parents’ marital context for the long-term adjustment of children with intellectual disabilities.
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Children with mental disabilities--Family relationships, Marital quality
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