Psychological wellbeing among parents of a child living with a serious chronic illness: A cross-sectional survey study.

The sample was small and unevenly distributed across illnesses, with only 10 parents of children with developmental and epileptic encephalopathy and 9 with a gastrointestinal disorder, so group comparisons are limited. Participants were mostly mothers, English-speaking, university-educated, and high-income, so fathers, culturally and linguistically diverse families, and lower-income families may be under-represented. The survey was cross-sectional, so it cannot show that a child's illness caused parent distress or that a support need would improve outcomes. Families were required to have at least one healthy sibling and were excluded if the child had died or was in end-of-life care, so the findings do not represent all families with chronic illness. The visual analogue scales were purpose-designed rather than validated, and multiple pairwise comparisons may have increased the chance of a false-positive finding. Parents were recruited through hospital clinicians using convenience and purposive sampling, which may bias who participated.

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest. Funding was from the Golda Meir Post-Doctoral Fellowship Fund and the National Health and Medical Research Council Australia (APP2008300).

Do not read the higher distress in parents of children with developmental and epileptic encephalopathy compared with parents of children with cystic fibrosis as proof that the illness caused the distress. The study was cross-sectional, the sample was small and unevenly distributed across illnesses, and only one pairwise distress comparison reached significance.