Participeren in de samenleving: de rol van ouders op het internetgebruik van jongeren met een verstandelijke beperking

Abstract

Introduction: Adolescents with an intellectual disability have difficulties in maintaining social contacts and finding a way to spend their leisure time. The use of internet can be helpful, but also has risks. Hardly any research has been done into the risk factors of internet used by intellectual disabled adolescents. In addition, there is hardly any research available on parents of a mentally disabled child and how they manage the internet use of their child. The research question is: “What is the role of parents on the internet use of their intellectual disabled children?” The purpose of this study is to compare the parenting roles concerning the internet use between children with and without an intellectual disability. Method: This research has been conducted on the basis of qualitative interviews. The total number of participants was thirteen. The processing and the analysis of data was done on the basis of NVivo 11. Results: From the interviews appeared that the internet use has a lot of advantages for the children, such as maintaining social contacts, how to spend their leisure time and the improvement of language skills. Disadvantages are –according to the parents– the compulsive use of internet, the influence images/movies have on the children and being susceptible of abuse. Three roles can be determined concerning the internet use of their child: the encouraging, the attendant and the controlling parent. Parents switch between these three roles. In general parents control the internet use of their mentally disordered children more than the internet use of their children without a disorder. Finally it has been found that the parents who participated in this survey have no need for information (sessions) about the use of internet of children with an intellectual disorder. Most parents do stress out that school lessons about this subject is important. Conclusion and discussion: The three parental roles from this study can be compared with the parenting styles from parents of children with a normal development. The difference is, however, that adolescents with an intellectual disorder are encouraged more than children without an disability to use the internet. Except they are in general more vulnerable, so parents control their internet use more compared to children with a normal development.