Abstract

The research was designed to study the parental attitude towards their crippled children and also the perception of the crippled children about their family support towards their parents. The sample of 30 special need children was drawn at random from such institutes of handicapped children of Islamabad and Rawalpindi such as Al-Farabi, G-8/4 Islamabad and Al-Ghazali Rawalpindi. It comprised of a sample of 15 physically handicapped boys and 15 physically handicapped girls. The age range of the sample was between 5 to 16 years. Another sample of 30 parents (15 couples) of those crippled children was also included in study. The ages of the parents were between 25-55 years old. The educational levels of parents were between illiterate to professionals. They belonging to upper, middle, and lower socio-economic status. A five-point Likert type Parent Attitude Scale developed by Butt (1991) was used to measure the parental attitude towards their physically handicapped children. For children a four-point Family Support Scale developed by Naz (2001) was used to measure the perceived family support of the children separately devised questionnaires, as certain information for different demographic variables such as age, gender, education and socio-economic status of parents. Responses were statistically analyzed by the means, standard deviations, t-tests, correlations and alpha reliability coefficient and ANOVA were also calculated to check the reliability of the instruments. Research finding showed the high reliability estimates of both scales. Results also indicated that family support was a crucial factor in the improvement of the perception of crippled child. The scores of both the scales were inversely correlated with each other. These findings suggest that, the parent’s over guardedness and concern generally lowers perceived family support of such child. They perhaps want to gain more autonomy. The amount of care and over protectiveness may lead to low self-esteem and developed the learned helplessness in such children. The study tried to stress the need for further research in the field of physically handicapped children and their parents’ psychology in order to promote better relationships among them. The suggestion was also mentioned

Keywords: Physically handicapped, Self-determining, Mentally handicapped