Abstract

Background and purpose: With the birth of child with disabilityy, parents are faced with many challenges. Generally, parents of children with disabilities have more stress than parents of typically developing children. So, the purpose of the present study was to investigate of the effectiveness of family- centered early interventions on stress symptoms in mothers of children with hearing impairment.

Method: Study procedure was experimental with pretest-posttest design with control group. The sample size was 32 mothers that were selected by available sampling method of all mothers of hearing impaired children in Shiraz city in the academic year 2014-2015 and assigned into experimental and group control, randomly. The number of each experimental and control groups were 16 mother. Stress symptoms Questionnaire was used to collect data. The data were analyzed using ANCOVA and MANCOVA.

Results: The results showed that there were significantly decrease in mean scores of stress symptoms and subscales (somatic symptoms, anxiety, social dysfunction and depression) in experimental group (P< 0.05).

Conclusion: Findings indicated that family- centered early interventions lead to improve stress symptoms in mothers of children with hearing impairment.