Parental Stress of Parents with Children with Disabilities-Correlation between Stress and other Variables in Croatian Context

Parenting brings significant changes in people's lives and becomes one of the most important significant events in the life courses of persons, partners and family (Priestley, 2001). The birth of a child with disabilities contributes to changes that lead to stress that could negatively affect the well-being of the family, the quality of the relationship between the partner and the relation of the parent to the child. This could create a chronic stress that causes dysfunction in the family more than other types of stressors and therefore these parents are a highly vulnerable group (Watson et al, 2011). The purpose of the research was to determine the significant correlations between parental stress and other variables such as gender, parental education, marital status, income, number of children, wellbeing, emotional regulation and support. The results show that: mothers experience significantly more stress than fathers; parents who have high education level and high level of stress; parents living in extramarital relation experience a higher level of stress; the lowest level of parental stress is experienced by parents with lowest income; interestingly the highest level of parental stress is reported by parents of only one child. Parents who experience less parental stress are more aware of their feelings, have better results on emotional warmth and use less negative communication also feel to get more support from partner and belong to community. These parents are able to engage in goal directed activities and engage strategies to emotion regulation. Parents reported high level of parental stress and this is important to do further investigations to find the causes of this high level of stress in order to plan the support.