Annunziato Rachel A, Rakotomihamina Volana, Rubacka Joseph
Department of Psychiatry, The Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY 10029, USA.
J Dev Behav Pediatr. 2007 Oct;28(5):386-91. doi: 10.1097/DBP.0b013e3181132074.
Chronic illness is highly prevalent among adults with children. It is therefore important to understand how parental illness may or may not have an impact on affected families. Findings thus far have suggested that differences between children with and without a sick parent are minimal, but there are individual and familial moderators of outcome. It is unclear whether these results are generalizable to single-parent families. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether maternal chronic illness affects multiple aspects of child functioning in a large, ethnically diverse sample of single-parent families compared to those not affected by illness. Potential moderators of differences, including maternal distress, parenting variables (aggravation and warmth), functional impairment related to illness, and demographic characteristics were also tested.
Using data from the Child Development Study (CDS), 812 mother-child pairs were studied. Mothers completed measures of child internalizing, externalizing, and positive behaviors, while children completed a measure of depression.
The results indicated that overall there were no differences between children with or without a sick mother on the measures of well-being. Higher symptom levels among both cohorts were associated with maternal distress and aggravation in parenting only. However, children with a sick mother were more likely to have a consultation due to emotional difficulties.
Several areas for future work on how illness affects single-parent families were identified such as prospectively studying illnesses with a variable course and determining which protective factors promote resiliency for children in this difficult situation.
慢性病在有孩子的成年人中非常普遍。因此，了解父母的疾病如何可能或不可能对受影响的家庭产生影响很重要。迄今为止的研究结果表明，有患病父母和没有患病父母的孩子之间的差异很小，但存在影响结果的个体和家庭调节因素。目前尚不清楚这些结果是否适用于单亲家庭。本研究的目的是检验与未受疾病影响的单亲家庭相比，母亲的慢性病是否会影响一个大型、种族多样的单亲家庭样本中孩子功能的多个方面。还对差异的潜在调节因素进行了测试，包括母亲的痛苦、育儿变量（严厉和温暖程度）、与疾病相关的功能损害以及人口统计学特征。
利用儿童发展研究（CDS）的数据，对812对母子进行了研究。母亲们完成了对孩子内化、外化和积极行为的测量，而孩子们完成了一项抑郁测量。
结果表明，总体而言，有患病母亲和没有患病母亲的孩子在幸福感测量方面没有差异。两个队列中较高的症状水平仅与母亲的痛苦和育儿中的严厉程度有关。然而，有患病母亲的孩子因情绪问题而进行咨询的可能性更大。
确定了未来关于疾病如何影响单亲家庭的几个工作领域，例如前瞻性地研究病程可变的疾病，并确定哪些保护因素能促进处于这种困境中的孩子的复原力。
