Over 1000 Townsville based members of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) were deployed on an eight month military operation to Afghanistan from August 2011 until May 2012. A similar scenario occurred many times in the Townsville community between 1999 and 2013 as members of the ADF have been deployed repeatedly to East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan.…

A longitudinal study investigated maternal social support and its relationship to mother/child stress, the amount of stimulation provided the child, and the child's cognitive development. The data presented here represent the 18 to 24 month follow-up on a subset of families studied in 1981 and 1982 concerning current maternal social support and…

To determine whether support systems ameliorated the impact of divorce on family stress and child adjustment, the present study examined the availability to divorced families of various support systems, including the extended family, church, work, and community groups. Specifically, the study addressed the impact of parental support systems on…

This investigation explored relationships between parenting stress, dyadic adjustment, and social support in families with normal healthy infants of 18 months of age. It was expected that parenting stress would be high when social support was absent and that this would be related to poor marital relationships. Participants were 34 families…

This study was undertaken to assess the impact of children's behaviors on employed parents' adjustment and to test a specific model of how spouse support may facilitate coping with the stress of a difficult child. It was hypothesized that child behavioral difficulty and spouse support would affect maternal depression through the mediation of…

A study examined relations among maternal stress, social support, adjustment, and the use of positive (encouraging) or negative (punitive) control strategies in a low socioeconomic status sample. The study sample consisted of 40 mother-son dyads examined longitudinally when the children were 18 and 24 months of age. During this period, mothers…

This series of discussion sessions and suggestions for further reading, was designed to serve as a guide for discussion groups made up of parents of preschool children. The first chapter discusses the organization of groups, leaders' qualifications, the general format of sessions, recordkeeping, and suggestions for the first and final sessions.…

In 1981 and 1982, pre- and postnatal medical, financial, demographic, and maternal social support data were collected from 220 lower socioeconomic status (SES), "high risk" mothers and their newborn infants. An analysis of data on the oldest 100 children in the sample found that 14 families had been referred to a children's protective services…

Pre- and post-natal medical, financial, demographic, and maternal social support data were collected from 220 lower socioeconomic status (SES), "high risk" mothers and their newborn infants. Additional data were obtained later from a subsample of 19 boys and 19 girls between 18 and 24 months of age and their mothers. Mothers ranged in age from 15…

This study examined the relationship between maternal stress, changes in stress, specific stressors, and social support and quality of mother-infant attachment. Life stress of 132 mothers was assessed prenatally and when the child was 13 months old. The mothers' social support and the quality of infant-mother attachment were also measured at the…

To estimate the influence of maternal stress, marital conflict, and psychosocial risk on the interaction between mothers and their children, this study observed 97 mother-child pairs in a laboratory setting in the presence of another unfamiliar mother-child pair. All families were francophone families from the Montreal, Canada, region; children…

This study investigated the effect of long-term professional social agency support on the level of stress perceived by mothers (N=65) of preschoolers with disabilities. Mothers completed the Questionnaire on Resources and Stress (QRS-F) and the Holmes and Rahe Social Readjustment Rating Scale. The hypothesis that stress is greater for mothers of…

The role of social support in moderating stress was examined in 65 parents of hyperactive children. The sample included 29 couples and 7 single mothers. The theoretical framework guiding the research was Lazarus' general model of stress. Each parent's psychological functioning was hypothesized to be a function of the severity of the child's…

The paper explores the impact of child variables, parent variables, and family resources (professional and informal supports) on the family's ability to cope with a child with special needs. Child variables include child gender, birth order, severity of handicap, degree of child dependency, extent of attachment, age of the child, and presence of…

This study was designed to examine two contrasting types of parent groups in terms of their differential effects on parents and their disabled infants. The first type of parent support group was focused upon the psychological adaptation of mothers to their disabled child. It was hypothesized that the parent-centered group would directly affect the…