Parental Attitudes Towards Mental Retardation (A Field Study on the Families of Children Enrolled in the Social Welfare House in Al-Bayda City)

Abstract

      The current study aims to identify parenting attitudes towards their children's mental retardation and their relationship to variables: kinship (father-mother), gender of the child, parent's educational level, and according to the date of joining the social care home. The sample consisted of (30) children from the care home, and two forms was applied to each child, the first form by the mother, and the second form by the father to know their attitudes towards him, meaning that (60) forms were collected, (31) forms for mothers, and (29) questionnaires for their fathers. The study also used the measure of parental attitudes towards mental retardation, prepared by Al-Lahami (1984), and to analyze the sample responses, the following statistical methods were used: split-half, Guttman, Pearson correlation coefficient, mean, standard deviation, T-test, and ANOVA. The results concluded that there is a high level of positive parental attitudes towards their mentally handicapped children and most of the parental attitudes, whether from the father or the mother, are initially characterized by discrimination between the mentally handicapped child and his normal siblings, and then comes after acceptance of the mentally handicapped child as he is, followed by parental attitudes characterized by rejection, then overprotection for this son As well as according to the variable of the gender of the child, male or female, the educational level of the parents, and the variable of the child's enrollment in the social care home in the dimensions of acceptance, rejection and excessive protection. While there are statistically significant differences in the positive attitudes of parents in the dimensions of neglect and discrimination after their children joined the social care home.