Parenting a Child with a Disability - Research Paper Example

? SOWK 503- Fall Assignment Article Critique Article Critique Parenting a Child with a Disability The article “Parenting a Child with a Disability: The Role of Social Support for African American Parents” by Ha, Greenberg and Seltzer talks of different social difficulties or challenges that parents of African American descent face raising their disabled children. Therefore, this paper seeks to analyze the article in order to highlight the different issues that come up when raising disabled children, and will apply the ecological systems theory to illustrate how these challenges are highlighted. Social Concern The main social concern described in the article is the concept of acceptance and the role of the society in assisting African American parents who live with disabled children. The article addresses different challenges that these parents face in the process of raising the child, where it cites the financial burden that parents have to carry treating the problems that their children go through and have to deal with every single day of his or her life. Other mentioned challenges include a social stigma of having a disabled child, where the child is not expected to live a normal life in a normally functioning society due to his/her dysfunctional state of being disabled. Findings of the research done on the subject are also presented as a part of the main ideas of the article - the psychological welfare of parents and children taking priority and how society comes in to play its role in adding to the challenges that parents and their children face or in bringing acceptance. The author talks of social interactions with people who do not belong to the same family and the effect of these interactions and relationships, which are established outside familial boundaries, on both parents and children. The included research indicates the author’s intention to deliver information on the affective domain, which appears to be the focus based on social interactions and individual considerations, in addition to having support structures in the society, where interactions and relationships are the main support systems. Moreover, it looks at the practical implications of the information provided and how it can be used to assist African American parents with disabled children. Application of Systems Theory A critical application of systems theory to the problems that African American parents face with disabled children reflect the concept of power, in which parents and children are in a state of powerlessness due to the physical or mental state of the child. This state is dependent on the areas that are affected by the disability making it a power struggle. The article depicts these parents as being challenged in relation to power, where their interactions in the society are limited to their level of ability as well as their cultural and personal characteristics. In the article, this implies that parents lack the ability to coerce the society into acceptance as it is expressed by a social stigma, which is one of the challenges that parents and children face (Ha, Greenberg & Seltzer, 2011). In addition, there is the concept of life stressors, which relates to issues that exceed the ability of a person, making the lives of these people extremely difficult by being life threatening. Thus, the article illustrates the effects of the interaction with non-spousal family members and the effect of interactions on children and parents, as this is not just a problem for parents or children. Instead, they are both affected, and the impact on parents is adverse, where African Americans family is a core entity or social unit, in which a lack of social support marks the presence of life stressors. This is because the absence of support further points to the oppression and stigma towards the parent and his or her child, which could easily lead to traumatic events for both. The analysis of the article using ecological systems theory further identifies coping measures amongst African American parents with disabled children as a critical factor even in its research findings. As such, the author of the article quotes the presence of a family as a measure through which parents could cope with the ensuing stress emanating from the struggle to keep up with the child’s upbringing. Moderating of both positive and negative coping measures is addressed as a means of active and effective coping mechanisms among parents under this condition. Without coping measures, the research finds that there are severely adverse consequences to the parents and family members as this is caused by negative social interactions. Further evidence suggests that the environment is the key factor in influencing coping, where there is a need for positive interactions as seen in the case of African American parents with disabled children, where they need social support to manage. In order to expound further on coping, relatedness and coping measures appear to be closely related with one another, where a sense of belonging boosts coping measures and eliminates life stressors. In this case, the article denotes the family as the core social unit for African American families, which translates to creating a sense of belonging for both parents and children so that they are emotionally attached and the isolation is eliminated. Further this is coupled with the idea of stigma, which is a part of life stressors, and needs to be eliminated within social interaction either in the family or in the society to create support systems (Li-Tsang, Yau & Yuen, 2001). Competence is also observed in the article, where organisms are intrinsically motivated to change their environment in order to survive in cases, where despite the state of their children, parents are able to manipulate their environment. As such, this is achieved through the suggestions provided towards assisting these parents to overcome their challenges in raising children with disabilities even in cases where parents are adversely affected to a virtual point of no return. Because of this, the article suggests the use of social interactions as positive motivation to resuscitate competence and implement it. Consequently, the aspects of positive and negative self-concept are displayed in the article, where all the earlier mentioned factors come into play in the lives of parents of children with disabilities (Lesser & Pope, 2007). The sense of a parent feeling worth is portrayed along with how the society and the family treat one another and relate to the case of disability, considering that the family is perceived to be the most important coping measure for this social problem. This could be positive for the parent or negative depending on the amount of support that he or she is receiving from the family and society members, where it also relates with life stressors. Without support, the problem that the parent faces becomes bigger than his or her ability to overcome; thus, the parent perceives the self as not worth of being unable to provide and support the disabled child. In spite of all the information provided by the article backed by statistics, it indicates that society, especially the African American society in urban areas is faced with unique problems. This however, leaves a number of questions unanswered in regard to why or how the research finding published in the article do not feature both parents, meaning that the entire research is rigged and biased. This way, even the theory of ecological systems fails to explain how life stresses only affect one spouse and not both of them and it also fails to explain the concept of competence on other members of society, but only does this for the mothers. This begs the question whether only one side of parents covers the perspective of all parents and society as a whole, or is the article biased altogether. Consequently, the theory also fails to express the concerns of power in the entire concept of power, where it fails to support children by not mentioning how children are affected, but instead focuses on parents. As a result, it treats parents and children as two unrelated parties, but the only uniting factor is the disability of the children. Other than these aspects of vulnerability and weaknesses, there are social forces and influences that also affect parents with children who have disabilities, which include the application of support groups. These support groups could include bringing together all children and their parents saving them from life stresses and boost their self-esteem as mentioned in self-concept. Other social forces could be assistance from social services to help these parents overcoming their problems in dealing with their disabled children. The most critical aspect of those in vulnerable positions is that of stigma, which has been repeatedly been mentioned in the article, but has not had an adequate coverage in the article as most attention has been paid only to coping and competence as well as stress, which leaves vulnerable groups uncovered. The focus is on the parental wellbeing and the exclusion of vulnerable groups, who in this case are disabled children from African American families in urban areas. Ecological systems theories are adequately and critically applied to the article, but only in certain perspective mentioned earlier such as life stress and coping, which appear to be the most mentioned of all (Algood, Harris, & Hong, 2013). References Ha, J., Greenberg, J., & Seltzer, M. (2011). Parenting a child with a disability: The role of social support for African American parents. The Journal of Contemporary Social Services, 92 (4), 405-411. Lesser, J., & Pope, D. (2007). Human behavior and the social environment: Theory and practice, 2/E. London: Pearson. Algood , C., Harris, C., & Hong, J. (2013). Parenting success and challenges for families of children with disabilities: An ecological systems analysis. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 23,126–136. Li-Tsang, C., Yau, M., & Yuen, H. (2001). Success in parenting children with developmental disabilities: Some characteristics, attitudes and adaptive coping skills. The British Journal of Developmental Disabilities, 47/ 2 (93), 61-71. Read More