Permanence and transformations of parental styles in the raising of people with disabilities

Abstract

This study aims at establishing the permanence and transformations of parenting styles in the upbringing of disable people around age of seven and identifying the possible explanations that motivate them. The study is based on the Parental Styles in Disability Model -MEPD- (Manjarrés & Hederich, 2018) that identifies and describes the ways in which parents educate their children. It is a longitudinal study of multiple cases that tracks the parental raising style of 18 participants with disabilities, at two stages of their lifetime (2011 and 2018). The results allow us to identify, seven years later, the presence of three of the four parental styles proposed by the MEPD: driving-reflexive, dominating-inflexible and dominated-complacent and the absence of the dominated-distant style. The permanence of the original parental style is evident in half of the cases, in which its functionality can be established. On the other hand, the transformations of the parental style show two possible transits: one of positive nature, the most common, points towards more favorable styles of the development of the child’s autonomy; the other, negative, points towards styles that favor a greater continued dependency. While the positive transformations are motivated by the gradual recognition of the child’s capacity, the negative ones are associated with the objective loss of the child’s capacity and the possibility of relating.