A Systematic Review and Research Agenda on Mental Wellbeing of the Caregivers of Intellectually Disabled Children

Abstract

Purpose: Intellectual disability is an umbrella term that focuses on the difficulties in understanding, comprehending, and applying things. Children having intellectual disabilities will have difficulty in adaptive functioning like understanding, communicating, identifying, learning, giving attention, or thinking. The main aim was to identify and intervene in the mental well-being of the caretakers and parents having intellectually disabled children. To elicit parents' perspectives on benefits for children having intellectual disability in connection with demographic details, formative years, resources, and to confront the consequences of upbringing a child with intellectual disability.

Design/Methodology/Approach: Systematic literature, resulting in the publication of studies that centered on the mental health of parents and caregivers of children having intellectual disability. Systematic literature scrutiny was performed using the search words intellectually disabled children, caregiver/ parents/ mother and mental health and well-being in the electronic databases Research gate, Academia, Google Scholar, and Psyc Info.

Findings/Result: As a result of caring for their challenged children, parents frequently experience physical and psychological discomfort, negatively impacting their psychological well-being in daily life.  Parents of children with severe disabilities may suffer more stress while caring for them since they demand more physical exertion. For a variety of reasons, it is considered that parents' physical and psychological well-being has a direct impact on their children. This article reviews the various literature and the interpretation can be useful for clinical purpose to improve, understand issues among caregivers of disabled children and also to provide future directions, to improve parental well-being by reducing parental stress Parents of children with intellectual disabilities are more likely to suffer from mental health problems, according to research.

Originality/Value: This review presents key findings from studies that show parental stress and the need for psycho education to help parents give their children with intellectual disabilities with evidence-based assistance and intervention. Given the increased risk of stress, anxiety, and depression that this demographic has been linked to, we first address stressors and challenges associated with intellectual disability, as well as the future direction of the present research. Following that, we describe contemporary trends and difficulties and seek to fill in gaps in the existing literature, indicating that more research is needed. We conclude that future research on psychoeducation intervention and relaxation therapy for improving the subjective wellbeing of caregivers of intellectually challenged children is needed. Implementing parental interventions in parallel with the child's interventions may raise mental health.

Paper Type: Systematic literature review-based analysis.