Looking after yourself as a parent: why your own coping matters too
Written by Louise Hawkley — MSc Rehabilitation (Neuro), BSc (Hons.) Occupational Therapy · RCOT & BABICM member
Caring for a child with a brain injury is, for many parents, a long-term role that runs alongside everything else: work, other children, and the ordinary demands of daily life. It is easy, and understandable, for parents to put their own needs last. My MSc dissertation looked at family functioning and resilience in children with acquired brain injury (ABI), the subject of our previous articles, but it did not look directly at parents’ own coping. The wider evidence on this is worth setting out, because it suggests that how parents cope is closely tied to how the whole family is doing, and to the picture of recovery I have written about before.
What we mean by ‘coping style’
Coping style refers to the habitual ways people respond to stress and difficulty. Researchers often distinguish between two broad approaches. Problem-focused, or active, coping involves tackling the practical aspects of a difficult situation directly: seeking information, making plans, or taking steps to change what can be changed. Emotion-focused coping involves managing the emotional impact of a situation rather than the situation itself, for example through avoidance, distraction, or seeking emotional support. Most people use a mixture of both, and neither approach is inherently right or wrong. What matters is whether it fits the situation, and whether it is sustainable over the long term (Prihadi, Dings and Van Heugten, 2015).
What the research found
Prihadi, Dings and Van Heugten (2015) studied 42 parents of 28 children and adolescents with ABI, all more than six months past their injury. Compared with a general population sample, mothers used emotion-focused coping strategies significantly more often, while fathers’ coping styles did not differ from men in the comparison group. There was no difference in how much either parent used problem-focused coping.
More importantly for families, the study found that parents who relied more heavily on emotion-focused coping reported poorer family functioning, lower quality of life, and higher caregiver strain. Parents who used more problem-focused coping also reported higher strain. The authors concluded that parents of children with ABI need support in their own right, including help to develop coping strategies that protect their own wellbeing, rather than simply finding ways to get through each day.
Why this matters for the whole family
Our earlier article on family functioning described how families of children with ABI reported significantly poorer family functioning, on average, than families of children without a brain injury, and how poorer family functioning was linked to a child’s sense of mastery, resourcefulness and emotional regulation. Prihadi, Dings and Van Heugten’s findings add another layer to this picture. Family functioning is not simply something that happens to a family from the outside. It is connected to how the adults within that family are coping, day to day, with an ongoing and often invisible source of stress.
Seen this way, a parent’s own wellbeing is not a separate issue from a child’s rehabilitation, sitting alongside it. It is part of the same picture, in the same way that family functioning, parenting style and a child’s resilience are all connected, as our other articles have discussed.
What this means in practice
None of this means parents are responsible for ‘fixing’ family functioning through sheer effort, any more than children are responsible for their own recovery through willpower. Brown and Whittingham (2015) describe the family environment as ‘a promising avenue for intervention’, and that includes the adults within it, not just the child. Recognising that parents are managing their own stress, on top of everything else, is part of understanding the family as a whole.
At Hawkley Rehab, this is part of why case management looks at the whole family picture, not just the child’s therapy goals. Part of the role is making sure parents know what support is available to them, whether that is practical help, someone to talk to, or simply space to be heard, alongside everything being put in place for their child. Our articles on family functioning, resilience and parenting style say more about the evidence behind this approach.
If you would like to talk about what this might mean for your family, please get in touch.
References
Brown, F. L. and Whittingham, K. (2015) ‘A Structured Behavioural Family Intervention with Parents of Children with Brain Injury’, in Neuropsychological Rehabilitation of Childhood Brain Injury. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 60–81. doi: 10.1057/9781137388223_4.
Prihadi, E. J., Dings, F. and Van Heugten, C. M. (2015) ‘Coping styles of parents of children and adolescents with acquired brain injury in the chronic phase’, Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine, 47(3), pp. 210–215. doi: 10.2340/16501977-1913.
