Ethnicity and parenting stress change during early intervention

Parenting stress as it pertains to the families of medically fragile children of different ethnic backgrounds has been understudied. Possible correlates of change in parenting stress such as child development, family support, resources and income were examined in the families of 105 infants with intraventricular hemorrhage #opIVH#cp participating in an early intervention program between one and three years of age. Correlational analyses showed that slower developmental progress, along with declines in family resources and social support coincided with increases in parenting stress. Subgroup analyses separately examining these relationships in the 66 white and 39 nonwhite families revealed different correlates for the two populations. Unlike the full sample and the white sample, the non-white families' stress changes over the course of intervention seemed correlated only to income change, but not to child's developmental progress or changes in social support. Commonly cited findings regarding parents' stress examined primarily with white families may need additional consideration with more diverse samples, as the same variables may have different influence in different cultures. †This article is based on senior research of the first author under the direction of the second author. ‡Dagger;Support for this research was provided by grant #HS90010001 from the United States Department of Education to the Early Intervention Research Institute #opEIRI#cp of the Utah State University. The authors thank Dr. A. Finch, Dr. A Glen Casto, Mary Ellen Heiner and Sonja Pinckney for their help and consultation.