Family Proactivity

This chapter reviews efforts to broaden research on families adapting to childhood disability and delay. First, we briefly review and critique the long standing emphasis in family research on crisis, stress, coping, and the restoration of emotional well being. Second, to broaden family research to include capacities other than crisis management we re-visit what Rueben Hill (1949) called the “established routines” of family life and what families do to sustain them. Third, we review contemporary research on families adapting to childhood disability for evidence that sustaining a daily routine of life is a function distinguishable from those attendant to crisis and stress. Finally, we examine the intervention and research implications of the idea that an enduring family project is creation and maintenance of a sustainable daily routine of life.

Although considerable research exists concerning families raising children with disabilities, relatively little work has examined the linkages between parent and sibling functioning. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to investigate the relationship between parental perceptions of family functioning and school-aged siblings' social skills and problem behaviors. A purposive sample of 78 sets of parents and their school-aged children participated. Half of the families were raising a child with a disability, and half of the families were not raising a child with a disability. Mothers and fathers completed the Porter-O'Leary Scale and Bloom's Family Functioning Measure. Teachers of the school-aged children completed a modification of the Gresham and Elliot Social Skills Rating System. Results indicated siblings of both groups demonstrate more social skills than problem behaviors, and siblings of children with disabilities were higher in cooperation and self-control than siblings of children without disabilities. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed fathers' perceptions of family conflict and external locus of control orientation, and mothers' perceptions of marital conflict predicted externalizing behaviors for female siblings of children with a disability.