Text 15. Parental Counseling

Counseling parents of children with disabilities has taken a number of different forms. Variations in counseling strategies reflect diverse professional orientations as well as differing family dynamics and needs. Because new challenges often arise as the child’s disability interacts with increased demands at different developmental stages, counseling is frequently a recurrent need.

Parental counselors include teachers, guidance counselors, educational evaluators, social workers, psychologists, physicians, and other parents. Counseling can range from informal and infrequent teacher / parent exchanges to long- term programs that involve all family members. Counseling approaches can be grouped into three broad categories, those providing information about the nature of the child’s disability, those offering psychotherapeutic insight into the often conflicting emotions that accompany recognition of the disability, and those providing training to improve parent / child interactions and to manage the child’s behavior. Counseling aimed at educating parents about the nature of their child’s disability is probably the most common. In order for parents confronted with a disabled child to make appropriate and realistic adjustments, they need various sources of accurate and pragmatic information.

The information-focused counseling provided by physician, psychologist, and / or evaluator when the child’s disability is first identified is clearly crucial for parents. Information centered counseling is also provided when teachers share their insights, goals, and expectations and when parent organizations (e.g., ACLD, ARC, Closer Look) offer pamphlets, telephone hotlines, and parent support groups. Psychotherapeutic approaches to parent counseling focus on helping parents to work through and resolve emotional stresses and conflicts often precipitated by the presence of a disabled child in the family. Such counseling can occur with parents and counselor alone, jointly with the disabled child, or with all active family members, including siblings and even caretaking grandparents. With advances in the understanding of the complex interrelations within families, the trend has been in the direction of including more family members in psychotherapeutic counseling (Foster & Berger, 1979).

Sibling relationships represent one of those significant complexities that recently has spawned nationwide sibling support groups as well as greater consideration of siblings within the context of counseling (Grossman, 1972). A third category of counseling is parent training programs. Through such programs, parents learn more effective means of communicating with their children and methods for better managing their children’s problem behaviors. Parent training programs teach techniques such as active listening and problem solving (Gordon, 1975), ways to function as filial therapists (Guerney, 1969), methods for becoming behavioral change agents (McDowell, 1974). Numerous research studies demonstrate that parents can be effective in working with and modifying their children’s behavior and that such parent involvement is generally positive (McDowell, 1976).

Increasingly, two theoretical notions, or frameworks, have informed many of the counseling approaches available to parents of children with disabilities: stages of grief theory and family systems theory. Regardless of the particular approach (educational, psychotherapeutic, or parent training), many of those who counsel parents have been guided by, or at least sensitized by, one or both of these frameworks. The first reflects the prevalent view that many, if not all, parents of handicapped children undergo some version of a mourning process in reaction to their child’s disability. To varying degrees, this represents a loss of the hoped for intact, healthy child. Variations on Kubler-Ross’s (1969) stages of grief theory have been proposed to explain parents’ emotional journey toward productive adjustment to their child’s handicapping condition (Seligman, 1979). These mourning stages include denial of the existence, the degree, or the implications of the disability; bargaining, often evident in the pursuit of magical cures or highly questionable treatments; anger, often projected outward onto the spouse or the helping professional or projected inward, causing feelings of guilt and shame; depression, manifest in withdrawal and expressions of helplessness and inadequacy; and acceptance, the stage in which productive actions can be taken and positive family balances maintained.

It is commonly believed that any of the earlier stages can be reactivated by crises or in response to the child’s or the family’s transitions from one developmental stage to another. Family systems theory, particularly Minuchin’s structural analysis (Minuchin, Rosman, & Baker, 1978) and Haley’s (1973, 1976, 1980) strategic approach provides another highly valued conceptual framework for counseling. Within this framework, families are seen as interdependent systems whose problems are relational. This view offers concepts and techniques for considering the effects on all parts of the family of intervention with one member or with one subsystem. By focusing on the dynamics of a family’s structure, hierarchy, and stage in the family life cycle, family systems theory offers a more complex, and therefore more accurate, understanding of the functioning, development, and needs of a particular family with a disabled child (Foster, Berger, & McLean, 1981). Both family systems theory and stages of grief theory are widely applicable conceptual influences within family counseling. Neither of these frameworks mitigates against using any of a wide variety of other educational, psychotherapeutic, or parent training methods to promote growth in families with children with disabilities.

(Source: Encyclopedia of Special Education, THIRD EDITION Cecil R. Reynolds and Elaine Fletcher-Janzen, Editors, 2007)

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