Some Dynamic Factors Affecting Family Adjustment to the Handicapped Child.

The article presents information on some dynamic factors that affect family adjustment to handicapped children. The impact of the handicapped child on the family can be less damaging if efforts to remove any reality basis for such feelings, which includes the unwittingly hostile responses to parents' hostility. Parental reactions to the birth of an orthopedically imperfect child differ more in degree than in kind from reactions of parents of more globally handicapped children. Although mothers seem to be involved more deeply at the time of birth of a child with mental disabilities, it is also believed that fathers have similar and related feelings.