Empatia rodziców a postrzegane przez nich znaczenie niepełnosprawności dziecka
Parents’ empathy and their perceived meaning of their child’s disability

Summary/Abstract: Disability is a complex phenomenon that has a significant impact on the specificity of the family system. Moreover, it is a condition that does not affect only the child itself, but also receives a subjectively assigned meaning by parents and other relatives, which remains strongly connected with the psychological characteristics of a person and, consequently, affects its functioning. The analysis of the literature indicates the importance of the issue of parents’ assessment of the meaning of their child’s illness, which affects the nature of the family system and the phenomena occurring in it. Additionally, attention is paid to the sources of the formulated meaning, emphasizing the importance of purely subjective factors, as well as personality traits, including, among others, empathy. The main aim of this study was to examine the relationship between parents’ empathy and their assessment of the meaning of their child’s illness. An additional aim of the present analyses was to determine gender differences on empathy dimensions and in the subjectively attributed meaning of the child’s illness by both parents. 33 mothers and 33 fathers participated in the study. The following research instruments were used: The Empathic Sensitivity Scale and the Disease-Related Appraisals Scale, modified for the purpose of the self-report study, which tests the importance of the child’s illness to the parent. The results obtained indicate that fathers’ personal distress is a predictor of their perception of their child’s illness as a loss, and personal distress and perspective taking were found to be predictors of perceiving illness as a threat. A predictive role for empathy in treating the child’s illness as a challenge and attributing positive value to the child was also observed, but it was not possible to determine which dimension of empathy was a predictor. Fathers’ personal distress was also found to be a predictor of mothers’ perception of their child’s illness as a challenge. In the present self-report study, a general conclusion was drawn that empathy generally sensitizes to the problem of child illness regardless of its dimension.

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