Thursday, July 19, 2007

Today, we first need to finish up some stuff from yesterday's class. There are a couple of discussion questions we didn't get to, so we'll take those up. Also, I wanted to show you a measure of coping.

On the topic of coping, here's the article I mentioned yesterday, about Texas Tech track-and-field athlete Patience Knight, who decided to keep competing while undergoing chemotherapy. Fitting with the idea of systems and routines, here's a quote from the coach, Wes Kittley:

"But all of sudden Patience tells us that she wants to continue competing and her doctors agree with her," Kittley said. "They said keeping the same routine would help the body fight off the cancer. I couldn't believe it."

The main topic we'll be covering today is parenting stress with newborn infants and young children. I'll start by reading some excerpts from the book Parents Under Siege (Garbarino & Bedard, 2001), on contemporary and historical sources of stress for families.

I will then discuss several research studies with you, which we should be able to bring up from the library's website:

One study (Mulsow et al., 2002, JMF), on which I'm a co-author, tracks stress appraisals in new mothers at 1, 6, 15, 24 and 36 months after the birth. The study also examines what factors are correlated with more (or less) pessimistic stress appraisals...

Another study (Copeland & Harbaugh, 2005, Issues in Comprehensive Pediatric Nursing) compares stress appraisals and distress in married and single mothers at 6-8 weeks after birth...

A Norwegian study (Kaaresen et al., 2006, Pediatrics) presents an intervention to reduce parenting stress after preterm birth...

Cornell professor Gary Evans, a prolific researcher on stress from the physical environment (crowding, noise, etc.), along with his co-author Kimberly English, present a study of poverty, environmental stress, and psychological and physiological responses (2002, Child Dev.)...

Finally, over on the right in the links section, where it says "Parenting Children with ADHD," William Pelham and Alan Lang summarize a set of creative studies that look into the expression "driven to drink."

This coming Monday, July 23, after our quiz, we'll have a guest speaker on parenting stress in households with adolescent children. These lectures on parenting stress with young children and adolescents will transition us into Chapter 2 of our textbook (applying the ABC-X model to parenting stress), which we'll discuss next Tuesday, July 24.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

On the topic of coping with ambiguous loss that we discussed in class, I highly agree that closure is a big part of coping when someone is missing. I feel that when someone is missing, it causes an extreme amount of stress on the family and loved ones. They have to deal with the stress of fearing the person's pain or death, the stress of wondering and of wanting more information, the stress of not knowing and all the other stresses that go along with worrying daily about the person who is missing. When the person is found, even in the horrible case that the person is found dead, I think the closure that the finding brings eliminates a lot of the stress that the family experienced, since despite the fact that they must deal with the stress of loss and despair, the constant worry and frustration is eliminated with this sense of closure. A family friend of mine had a brother who was a helicopter pilot in Iraq and went missing for months and was eventually found to be dead, and although our friend's family was extremely sad and upset at his loss, the closure of his finding helped to eliminate all the worry and stress while he was missing and brought a sense of peace to the family. So, all in all I agree with what was said in class that closure plays a big part of the coping process for those experiencing ambiguous loss.

July 21, 2007 at 1:34 PM
Anonymous said...

Angela, your comment, as well as our class discussion about ambiguous loss, reminds me of a pretty good movie that deals with this issue... "the upside of anger"

I would recommend it for your Netflix queue :)

July 22, 2007 at 7:06 PM

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