News Flash! Special-Needs Parenting Is Stressful!

According to the headline of a post today on the blog Disability Scoop, "Autism Moms Have Stress Similar To Combat Soldiers." The post describes a pair of studies from November's Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. The first measured the presence of the hormone associated with stress in a group of mothers of adolescents and adults with autism and found it to be "extremely low, consistent with people experiencing chronic stress such as soldiers in combat."

The second surveyed the same moms about how tired they were, how often their day was disrupted, and what they did with their free time. According to the Disability Scoop post, "Mothers of those with autism reported spending at least two hours more each day caregiving than mothers of children without disabilities. On any given day these moms were also twice as likely to be tired and three times as likely to have experienced a stressful event. What's more, these moms were interrupted at work on one out of every four days compared to less than one in 10 days for other moms."

I'm kind of surprised that they could find any mom, regardless of a child's disabilities, who would report not being tired, or not having one stressful event on any given day. It's not the one stressful event that gets you. It's the ten stressful events in a row. Of the interruptions at work, one in ten days sounds kind of high to me for moms of typically developing kids, and one in four maybe a little low for kids with behavior challenges. I'm happy to see that the survey results include the fact that "mothers of an individual with autism were just as likely to have positive experiences each day, volunteer or support their peers as those whose children have no developmental disability," because that's not the impression you'd get from, say, Autism Speaks PSAs.

One of the study's researchers is quoted as saying, "On a day-to-day basis, the mothers in our study experience more stressful events and have less time for themselves compared to the average American mother," and I'd say that's pretty generally true for any parent of a child with special needs. For a follow-up study, I'd be curious to see how mothers of children with different sorts of special needs compare to one another. Is parenting a child with autism more or less stressful than, say, parenting a child with serious illness, or chronic illness, or cognitive disabilities, or mental illness. I've sure seen bragging rights to most stressed and most terribly life-ruined argued on e-mail lists and online forums. Might be nice to have some statistics to sort it out.

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