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

Mothers of children with intellectual disabilities may experience long-term caregiving demands that affect their emotional well-being, coping processes, and family life. Family resilience provides a systemic framework for understanding how families adapt to ongoing challenges by drawing on shared belief systems, organizational resources, communication, and problem-solving processes. Mindfulness, in turn, emphasizes present-moment awareness and a nonjudgmental approach to thoughts, emotions, and bodily experiences. Integrating these two approaches may provide a way to support both individual awareness and family-related coping resources.

The Mindfulness-Based Family Resilience Group Intervention was developed by integrating Walsh's systemic family resilience framework with core mindfulness principles and practices. The program was designed to help mothers become more aware of their thoughts, emotions, and bodily responses; relate to difficult experiences with greater acceptance and self-compassion; recognize automatic patterns of responding; and identify personal and family strengths and resources. Family resilience processes, including meaning-making, organizational patterns, communication, and problem solving, were addressed alongside mindfulness-based experiential practices.

The intervention consisted of eight weekly group sessions, each lasting approximately 90 minutes. Across the program, participants engaged in practices involving breath and body awareness, present-moment attention, nonjudgmental observation of thoughts and emotions, acceptance, self-compassion, emotion regulation, and reflection on personal and family resources. Experiential exercises and group discussions were used to connect mindfulness practices with participants' caregiving experiences, parenting roles, and family relationships.

The study used a randomized controlled, embedded mixed-methods design. The quantitative component was designed to evaluate changes in family resilience and mindfulness over time and to compare these changes between the intervention and usual-care control conditions. The qualitative component was embedded within the intervention process to provide a more detailed understanding of participants' experiences and the processes accompanying change.

Qualitative information obtained from group-session recordings and field notes was examined using thematic analysis. This component focused on how participants described and made sense of their caregiving experiences, difficult thoughts and emotions, parenting roles, personal and family resources, and changes experienced during the intervention. Integrating the quantitative and qualitative components was intended to provide a broader understanding of both changes in the measured outcomes and the experiential processes accompanying those changes.

Inclusion criteria

• * Mothers of children aged 9-17 years.

• Mothers whose children had mild or moderate intellectual disability.
• Willingness to participate in the study and provide informed consent.

Exclusion criteria

• Mothers whose children had severe intellectual disability.
• Not meeting the predefined inclusion criteria.
• Declining to participate in the study.