Parent-Child Interaction in the Context of a Chronic Disease

The parent-child relationship plays a crucial role in every chronic disease and especially in the course of childhood diabetes type 1. The present study explores the characteristics of parent-child interaction in Greek families in which one child suffers from diabetes, and the way that this relationship has affected the family's capacity to deal with the psychosocial aspects of the disease. Our extended research employed qualitative methods (observation and in-depth interview), using criteria based on the structural model of the 'psychosomatic family'. We provide a typology of the parent-child relationship in these families: enmeshment, mother-patient coalition, parental splitting, over-protectiveness, lack of limits, the patient's involvement in marital crisis, parentification of a non-symptomatic child, and ambiguity of roles and rules. These characteristics seem to typify the parent-child relationship in various chronic diseases. (author abstract)