This presentation describes research on families with mentally retarded children, focusing on trends since 1983, the year that family research issues were reconceptualized in a paper titled "A Model of Stress, Coping, and Family Ecology" by Keith Crnic and others. The trend analysis concentrates on four issues: (1) the magnitude of the impact of the child's disability on the family and the resiliency of the family; (2) the increasing level of sophistication and perception concerning the multidimensional mechanisms that account for variation in how families respond to mental retardation; (3) the level of knowledge of how parents and families react, cope, and find resources during the first 5 years of the lives of their disabled children, compared to knowledge of the next 40 or 50 years; and (4) use of the mother as the primary family informant, especially mothers who are white middle class. The paper concludes that professionals need to identify the degree of fulfillment and personal growth that new parents get from their parental experiences, rather than always measuring strains and burdens. (JDD)