MIND-FULNESS-BASED FAMILY RESILIENCE INTERVENTION FOR MOTHERS OF CHILDREN WITH INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES

Mothers of children with intellectual disabilities may experience long‐term caregivingdemands that affect their emotional well‐being, coping processes, and family life. Familyresilience provides a systemic framework for understanding how families adapt to ongoingchallenges by drawing on shared belief systems, organizational resources, communication,and problem‐solving processes. Mindfulness, in turn, emphasizes present‐moment awarenessand a nonjudgmental approach to thoughts, emotions, and bodily experiences. Integratingthese two approaches may provide a way to support both individual awareness andfamily‐related coping resources.The Mindfulness‐Based Family Resilience Group Intervention was developed by integratingWalsh's systemic family resilience framework with core mindfulness principles andpractices. The program was designed to help mothers become more aware of their thoughts,emotions, and bodily responses; relate to difficult experiences with greater acceptanceand self‐compassion; recognize automatic patterns of responding; and identify personaland family strengths and resources. Family resilience processes, includingmeaning‐making, organizational patterns, communication, and problem solving, wereaddressed alongside mindfulness‐based experiential practices.The intervention consisted of eight weekly group sessions, each lasting approximately 90minutes. Across the program, participants engaged in practices involving breath and bodyawareness, present‐moment attention, nonjudgmental observation of thoughts and emotions,acceptance, self‐compassion, emotion regulation, and reflection on personal and familyresources. Experiential exercises and group discussions were used to connect mindfulnesspractices with participants' caregiving experiences, parenting roles, and familyrelationships.The study used a randomized controlled, embedded mixed‐methods design. The quantitativecomponent was designed to evaluate changes in family resilience and mindfulness over timeand to compare these changes between the intervention and usual‐care control conditions.The qualitative component was embedded within the intervention process to provide a moredetailed understanding of participants' experiences and the processes accompanyingchange.Qualitative information obtained from group‐session recordings and field notes wasexamined using thematic analysis. This component focused on how participants describedand made sense of their caregiving experiences, difficult thoughts and emotions,parenting roles, personal and family resources, and changes experienced during theintervention. Integrating the quantitative and qualitative components was intended toprovide a broader understanding of both changes in the measured outcomes and theexperiential processes accompanying those changes.