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New York City
May 2003

Blackman Lecture at Teachers College

If it was just another dreary and wet pre-spring day outdoors, the scene inside Grace Dodge Hall at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College was something else entirely. There, Professor Loraine Masters Glidden was proffering a fresh departure from decades of conventional wisdom about disabled children and their families.

That day, Glidden, chair of the psychology department at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, explained how disabled children don’t necessarily affect depression, anxiety, and stress in their parents, and often grow up emotionally balanced. She called the talk, which was delivered as the 2003 Leonard and Frances Blackman Lecture, “Positive Psychology and Rearing Children with Developmental Disabilities: Still Happy After All These Years?” And the answer is Yes.

“There really has been a shift in the zeitgeist in the last decade,” Glidden said. “People were beginning to look at families who had children with disabilities in a somewhat different light. They were beginning to back off of the notion of chronic sorrow, of crisis, of pathology, and we’re beginning to look and find more positive outcomes.”

In her talk, she explained how her long-term study of over a hundred families showed that “parents rearing children with disabilities report many positive outcomes,” and how parents’ personalities “especially general mental health and stability, influence long-term adjustment.” Her conclusions, she found, applied to children with all sorts of developmental disabilities, ranging from Down Syndrome (37 percent of her sample) to Cerebral Palsy (15 percent) to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (3 percent). And, perhaps most strikingly, her conclusions applied to both adoptive parents and birth parents.

“In terms of the long-term positive adaptation,” she said, “the birth families… didn’t differ from the adoptive families—who you expect to have good functioning because they chose to do this and were vetted by the agencies. The fact that [adoptive families] were doing real well is not surprising. But that the birth families were doing so well was a departure from conventional wisdom.”

Glidden, who is president of the division on mental retardation and developmental disabilities of the American Psychological Association, said she thought the talk went off well.

“Based on the comments I got afterwards, there was a lot of interest. I think basically, the audience was pretty interested in the topic, and there were multiple questions.”

Now in its fourth year, the Blackman Lecture is sponsored by the Teacher’s College Center for Opportunities and Outcomes for People with Disabilities. Professor Linda Hickson, who helps run the center, said “We all thought it was the best ever.”

Leonard Blackman, a former professor at Teacher’s College, also attended the conference. He worked with Glidden during the 1970s when she held a post at Teacher’s College, and the two shared an interest in developmental disabilities. That, Hickson explained, is why Blackman suggested her for the talk.

Glidden said her findings are in keeping with a sea change in family psychology regarding positive psychology. Past research, she explained, has always been focused on depression and negative emotional indicators, but researchers in the last two decades have come to regard positive indicators as equally important in explaining family interaction.

“In order to find positive outcomes it is necessary to look for them,” she said in her presentation. “We need to study strength and resilience as much as stress and burden. Optimal human functioning is as important to study as impaired functioning. We must learn to promote the positive as well as prevent the negative.”#

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