Educational Intervention for Reducing Parenting Stress of Mentally Challenged Children

A Quasi experiment with interrupted time series design was employed to know the impact of educational intervention to parents of 65 mentally challenged children for reducing parenting stress. An educational package was developed to provide knowledge regarding ability of mentally challenged children, the importance of early intervention and various therapies for the children and techniques of stress management to reduce parenting stress. Paired t-test and effect size was used to know the effect of intervention. Comparison of mean scores of parenting stress between pre and post test revealed statistically significant (P<0.05) differences indicating that at post intervention, parents were significantly lower on Parenting stress (79.96), the dimensions of parent child difficult interaction (26.24) and difficult child (33.76) but not in parental distress. Significant differences on dimensions of parental stress were noticed in parental distress. The effect size ranged from 0.36 to 0.80. The knowledge index was 81.45 percent with a range of 68.18 to 95.45 per cent. Thus the programme was highly effective in reducing the parenting stress and in enhancing the knowledge regarding management of mentally challenged children.