[Changes in maternal stress with the age of her developmentally disabled child--comparison between mentally retarded and autistic children using cross-sectional data].

In order to explore a transitional pattern of mother's psycho-social stress accompanying the age of developmentally-disabled child, we analized the stress patterns obtained from 1 036 mothers of mental retarded and autistic children by means of 10 stress scales consisted of four or five items for each scale. Mothers of 3 to 15 yrs old children, classified by cross-sectional method, were divided by their child's age into seven groups, and multiple-range tests were applied to the mean stress scores of mothers in the seven groups for each of two disability. In the results, we found three kinds of transitional patterns of stress. They were named as follows: No change type, Decreased type, and increased-at-first, but later-decreased type. These transitional patterns are common to two disabilities in the same scale, and furthermore it is worthy of notice that the stage of changing point of increase or decrease of the amount of stress coincides with the periods of child's entrance to primary school and/or junior high school at almost all scales.