Exploring Resilience in Mothers of Adolescents With Intellectual Disabilities in Thailand: A Qualitative Study.
Wattana Tejakum, Maria Truesdale, Deborah Cairns
Thai mothers described resilience as active daily work (accepting their child, teaching practical skills, leaning on Buddhist faith and peer parents) not a fixed trait.
They also reported persistent stigma, exhaustion, and difficulty reaching services.
Key findings
1Mothers described resilience as an ongoing, active practice — accepting their child's condition, teaching daily skills, drawing on faith and peer support, and planning ahead — rather than a fixed personal quality.
2Mothers reported persistent stigma in public spaces, emotional exhaustion from round-the-clock caregiving, and difficulty accessing community support, particularly in urban settings where traditional neighbourhood networks were weak.
3Buddhist practices (prayer, merit-making) and the concept of thum-jai (making peace in your heart) were described as central to emotional regulation and meaning-making in everyday caregiving, not peripheral to it.
Still to come
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What it does not show
Small purposive sample of 12 mothers recruited from a single specialised institute in Bangkok; the authors state the findings are not generalisable. Participants' access to support services at a tertiary centre may differ substantially from mothers in rural or less-resourced areas of Thailand. Only mothers' perspectives are represented; fathers, other caregivers, and the adolescents themselves were not included. No formal member checking of the analysis was performed, to avoid adding burden to the mothers. All interviews were conducted, transcribed, and translated by the same researcher, which limits independent verification of the translation.
Declared interests
Funded by the Royal Thai Government Scholarship (grant PH_G5620). The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read these themes as evidence that faith-based support, peer groups, or any specific programme is effective. This is a description of what 12 mothers in one Bangkok clinic said about their own coping, not a test of any intervention. The sample is small, single-site, and urban, so it says little about rural or less-resourced families, and the themes reflect one cultural context rather than a universal caregiving pattern.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →