Strengthening the social relationships of mothers with learning difficulties.

Accessible summary • Many mothers with learning difficulties want help with meeting people and making friends, and ‘getting out and about’ in their community. • We worked with mothers with learning difficulties and family support workers to create a programme, the ASLP, to help mothers achieve their goals to get out and about in the community. • This programme involves mothers meeting, talking and learning together over a 12-week period. Mothers also receive one to one support to work on their individual goals. • We tested the programme with 32 mothers and most mothers achieved their goals and now feel better about themselves and more confident about being in the community. • This programme is now available for other service workers to use to support mothers with learning difficulties in their communities. Mothers with learning difficulties are often isolated within their local communities. They also report low levels of social support. Social disconnection is associated with high levels of stress and poorer mental health, and in turn, adverse parenting and child outcomes. In the study reported here, a multi-site, intervention group only, repeated measures research design was employed to determine the efficacy of a group-based, adult-learning programme designed to strengthen the social relationships and improve the psychological wellbeing of mothers with learning difficulties. Thirty-two mothers with learning difficulties completed the programme across six sites in Australia. The effects of the programme on perceived social support and psychological wellbeing were substantially greater than established benchmarks for parent-training and family support programmes. These promising findings warrant further investigation, ideally employing a randomised-controlled trial design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]