The demographic and the psychosocial characteristics of the parents who have a handicapped child examined in terms of some variables

m THE SUMMARY In this study the demographic and the psychosocial characteristics of the parents who have a mental handicapped child have been examined in terms of some variants. During his life time an individual has to adopt a lifestyle which is appropriate to his age, sexuality, the socio-economic structure he has and the cultural values. But when having disabilities at some fields like knowledge, physiology, sense, the individual can't perform this lifestyle and this makes clear that the individual is a handicapped. Not only does this situation affect the life of the handicapped individual, but also the life of his parents and the society. Having a handicapped child whereas they would like to have a healthy child means a very difficult life as both sentimental and structural for the parents who are just getting ready for a new change in their lives and setting all the plans upon this. Because having a handicapped child includes some difficulties such as undertaking more responsibility when looking after and growing up the child, not having enough knowledge related the child's situation, insufficiency of the appropriate treatment services etc. And a handicapped child's birth or having one is a situation which may affect the lives, the senses, the thoughts and the behaviors of the family members negatively and may cause fundamental changes in the family because of some variable difficulties such as coping with the negative attitudes of the people around. In order to examine the demographic and the psychosocial characteristics of the parents who have a mental handicapped child in terms of some variants, 54 persons participated in among the parents of the mental handicapped students who are registered to The Elazığ Mental Handicapped Rehabilitation and Education Centre which performs activities in Elazığ The search is limited with 1 year and an interview schedule, an observation and therapy form developed and used for collecting the data which belong to the variants examined in the search.IV Among the qualitative searching forms this one is a field searching model. The matter rooted interview was used as data collecting technique, the summary record technique was used as data processing and the content analyzing method was used for analyzing the obtained data. At the result of the search it was viewed that those which were lived during the parents' adaptation process to the handicapped child may be affected by many different variants such as the parents' personal characteristics, ages, education levels, socioeconomic situations, the handicapped child's age, the child's handicap ratio, the society they live in, the social support and the facilities they get, and again it was viewed that the situations lived at the result of this effects may differ from family to family. For this reason making a generalization will be wrong. In addition to this the demographic and the psychosocial characteristics of the parents who have a handicapped child examined in terms of some variants and the findings below have been discovered. 1. In most families the mothers don't work anywhere, and they are housewife. 2. In 22 families only the father works and meets the needs of the family, but the number of the families in which both father and mother work are just 5. 3. The parents mostly share their thoughts related the handicapped child only each others. 4. The parents are anxious about nobody will look after their child after their death and this makes them more anxious than the others. 5. The fathers participate in child's care less than the mothers. 6. Alcohol and cigarette addiction ratio increases among this sort of parents. 7. The parents want their children to meet their own needs and to have an economic independence. 8. All of these families live some troubles at different rates among the family, relatives and the society.