Mothers with schizophrenia

the relationship between maternal ability to recognize affect and the characteristics parent-child relationships

Abstract

Introduction. Mental illness in the mother is associated with dysfunctional parenting styles. There is an opinion that there is a relationship between affect recognition abilities in mothers and the nature of parent-child relationships. However, the number of studies in this direction is extremely limited, and the results are ambiguous and require clarification.

The aim of the study was to investigate the nature of parent-child relationships in mothers with schizophrenia, the maternal ability to recognize affect in study groups consisting of mothers with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and healthy controls and whether affect recognition abilities impact on the quality of parent-child relationships in a sample of mothers with schizophrenia, when compared to mothers with no mental health diagnosis.

Materials and methods. The study involved mothers with schizophrenia (n = 85) and mentally healthy mothers (n = 51) who have healthy children aged 3 to 14 and live with them. The assessment of parent-child relationships was carried out using a questionnaire for parents "Analysis of family relationships". In order to identify typological groups with similar styles of parent-child relationships in the studied sample of mothers, an analysis of the internal structure of parent-child relationships was carried out using exploratory factor analysis with subsequent clustering of the set of indicators of the obtained factors based on the K-means method. To test the hypothesis that ability to recognize affect  may be associated with quality of parent-child relationships regression analyses using the results from the emotion recognition tasks to predict variables of parent-child relationships.

Results. Styles of parent-child relationships among mothers with schizophrenia have been determined. A connection was found between the nature of the parent-child relationship and the presence of a diagnosis of schizophrenia in the mother and maternal ability to recognize affect.

Conclusions. Mothers with schizophrenia practice styles of parent-child relationships similar to mentally healthy mothers, while maternal schizophrenia is more often associated with dominant hyperprotection against the background of a phobia of loss of a child and, less often, child-parent relationships that do not have dysfunctional features.  Maternal ability to recognize adult affect impact on the quality of parent-child relationships