The Psychological Effects of Having a Child with a Speech Disorder

Background: The experience of having a child with especial needs can be like a death in the family experience. Several studies have been conducted on the burden and expressed emotion and the results have shown that having a child with special needs creates psychological pressure. Objectives: The present study compares the caregiver burden and expressed emotion in mothers with or without children with a speech disorder. Methods: To achieve the goal of research, 50 mothers of children (6 to 8 years old) with speech disorder in clinics of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences and 50 mothers without children (6 to 8 years old) with speech disorder in elementary schools in Isfahan were chosen by a targeted sampling method. They responded to instrument of family burden Inventory and short form of self-expressiveness in the Family Questionnaire. Data was analyzed between these two groups by utilizing the independent ttest and Spearman’s correlation coefficient. Result: The findings indicated there was a statistically significant difference between these two groups of mothers in psychological burden (p<0.05). Mothers with a child who had speech disorder had experienced more objective and subjective burden than mothers without children with speech disorders. Besides, the results revealed that there was a direct significant association between caregiver burden and expressed emotion (p<0.005). While the findings showed that there was no significant difference between mother with or without children with speech disorder in positive, negative expressed emotion