Despite the importance of family support for the recovery of children with thermal injuries, there has been little investigation into the needs and psychological well-being of parents during this time. The overall aims of this research were to investigate how parents understand the experience of having a child who has had a burn, to evaluate the relevance of existing models of parental adjustment from the paediatric health psychology literature and draw out implications for clinical practice. Ten families participated, including six with children who had over ten percent total body surface area burns. A qualitative research method was used and semi-structured interviews were conducted with individual parents and couples at participants' homes. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was used to analyse the data provided by the resulting interview transcripts.
The impact on parental well-being was explored through considering parents' constructions of their child's accident/injury and the consequences of the whole experience. Intra-personal, interpersonal and other threats were identified for parental well-being. Strategies for managing threats were also identified. Key threats to parental well being were related to the beliefs they held about the severity and seriousness of their child's injury, perceptions that the injury had had a negative impact on their child, blaming themselves for the accident and feeling blamed by others. Coping strategies included those which enabled parents to distance themselves from the emotions generated by the accident and its consequences, strategies which maintained parents' hopes about the future and their child's recovery and strategies that enabled threats to be managed by both parents or the whole family. The relationship between threats and coping strategies appeared to be complex and changed over time.
The results were compared with two bodies of literature which have emerged from research evaluating parental adjustment to chronic illnesses and traumas suffered by their children. Stressresiliency models have focused research on a variety of stressors and protective factors that are proposed as influencing parents' generalised experiences of stress and trauma models, which conceptualise parents' adjustment as related to specific anxieties linked to their child's response to an illness or traumatic event or the parents' own experience of their child's health being threatened. Implications for future research and clinical practice were then considered.