Quality of Life and Burden of Care of Parents of Autistic and Normal Children

Autism is the most severe developmental disability. It involves impairments in social interaction, limited interests, strange eating or sleeping behaviors or a tendency to hurt oneself. Parenting a child with Autism can be an exhausting task, which may increase parental burden of care and may affect the quality of life. The present study aims to examine the Quality of life and Burden of care of Parents of Autistic and Normal children. The sample for the research comprised of 56 Parents of Autistic children and 74 Parents of Normal children. The sample of parents of autistic children was selected with the help of hospital and NGO records and the parents of normal children were selected from the schools of Pune and Mumbai city of Maharashtra. The questionnaires used for the study were Psychological Well-Being scale by Ryff and 'Burden Of Care' scale by Thara et al. The results reveal that when the 'Quality of life' as a whole, is considered, there is no significant difference between parents of Autistic and parents of Normal children (t= .368 is not significant) but dimension wise analysis shows that the parents of autistic children differ significantly on 'Environmental Mastery' (t = 2.46; p < 0.05), and 'Self Acceptance' (t = 3.31; p < 0.01). On 'Burden of care' scale a significant difference is seen between parents of Autistic and normal children (t = 3.40, p < 0.01).