Religious Coping Styles of Mothers with Children with Down Syndrome
DOWN SENDROMLU ÇOCUĞA SAHİP ANNELERİN YAŞAMLARINDA BAŞVURDUKLARI DİNİ BAŞAÇIKMA TARZLARININ BELİRLENMESİ

Author : -BURCU GÖREN
Number of pages : 138-153

Abstract

Having a mentally retarded child is difcult for parents and this situaton gives the start of a new era in their parent's life. These families who start a new process with partcipaton of a mentally disabled child to the family in their lives and they need to reshape expectatons and plans for the future which is related to development of their disabled child and cope with many unexpected sources of stress and internal and forced to pass through familial various transformatons (Abery, 2006). Parents need to cope with this unexpected situaton which change opposite directon of their life and which have a big power to change the colour of their life. They try to adapt to the situaton with a number of coping methods, but, the contnuity of disability, requires the contnuity of the coping effort. In our study, we conducted interviews with 13 mothers of children with Down syndrome. Data were collected through semistructured interviews in Ankara in Turkey. We found that, mothers are using religious coping styles, especially positve coping strategies like collaboratve and submissive coping strategies. They need to give meaning to their situaton with their children and feel themselves holy and as a chosen people for an important task. And they think their children is a "heaven key", "heavenly person" and "angel". They ask help from God to give the right of difcult tasks, they want power and patence from Allah. In additon, it has been found that the mother of the disabled children have an approach about having a disabled child as a personal transformaton and a self-development/training opportunity And also they think about their children some metaphysical meaning (blessing, richness and luck of their house and their life) as a positve religious coping strategy. It has been found that mother using some negatve religious coping styles, especially deferring coping style and belief in divine justce was determined heavily.

Keywords

religious coping styles, down syndrome, belief in divine justce, collaboratve style, deferring style

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