This work was supported by a grant from Shalem Fund
The phenomenon of parental burnout develops mainly due to an imbalance between risk factors for burnout (ongoing exposure to parenting demands) and protective factors (available coping resources). Mothers of children with special needs are at high risk for parental burnout due to the child’s functioning as compared to his peers, the child’s dependence on them and the burden of prolonged treatment. This mixed-methods study examined a model for describing the contribution of the nexus of correlations between risk factors and protective resources and parental burnout among mothers of children with and without special needs from the ultra-Orthodox and non-Orthodox sectors .In the quantitative part, it was found that these correlations explain about half of the variance in parental burnout among all mothers, and significantly stronger among mothers of children with special needs compared to mothers of children without special needs. In the qualitative part, it was found that while parental burnout of mothers of children with special needs is related to the child’s functioning level, the severity of his disability and his dependence on them, it is also combined with the way the mothers experience motherhood and the perceptions of the society and the mothers themselves of their role as their child’ primary caregiver.
Key words : Parental burnout, mothers of children with special needs, caregiver burden, severity of disability, child’s functioning, social support, learned resourcefulness, emotion work, utilization of health services, ultra-Orthodox and non-Orthodox sectors