The Children with Hearing Disabilities: Mothers’ General Health Status and Children’s Quality of Life

Background: Having disabled children can definitely hurt the mental health status of parents, especially mothers, and even directly affect children’s behaviors as well as their adaptability and progress during all care and rehabilitation programs. Objectives: The main purpose of this study was to investigate general health status of mothers having children with hearing disabilities and reflect on children’s quality of life (QoL). Methods: This descriptive-analytical study was performed on all children with hearing disabilities covered by the State Welfare Organization (SWO) of Iran in northern Khuzestan province in 2019. Accordingly, a total of 44 children aged 1 - 6 years and their mothers were included. The data were collected using a demographic characteristics information form, the 28-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) and the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research Academic Medical Centre (TNO-AZL) Preschool Children Quality of Life (TAPQOL) questionnaire. The data were entered into the SPSS Statistics software (ver. 22) and analyzed using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation coefficient, Spearman’s rank-order correlation coefficient, and chi-square test. Results: According to the results, 79% of the mothers had severe general health problems. The severity of such problems had further elevated in the dimensions of “physical symptoms”, “anxiety and sleep disorders”, “depression”, and “social functioning”, respectively. The mean score of the children’s QoL was 79.13 ± 14.48, which was at a moderate level. The study findings showed a significant relationship between some demographic characteristics and the mothers’ general health status and the children’s QoL. Moreover, there was a reciprocal correlation between mothers’ general health and children’s QoL scores (P = 0.049, r = -0.29). Conclusions: Although QoL in the children having hearing disabilities was at a moderate level, the majority of mothers had severe general health problems. The study results could be useful for health system officials in terms of the promotion of children’s QoL by designing and implementing programs to improve the general health status of the mothers of these children.