Self-efficacy of mothers with epileptic children

Background:Epilepsy is one of the most prevalent chronic diseases in childhood. Mothers play an important role in caring and control of seizures in affected children and thus they are under heavy pressure. Management of a child with epilepsy is very difficult and some epileptic seizures are uncontrollable even under the medication diet. In addition children affected by epilepsy are not able to control the seizures, so parents, especially mothers, should take the responsibility most of the times. One of the most important capabilities of mothers who have a child with epilepsy is self-efficacy and management in control of epileptic seizures. Self-efficacy is defined as a concept of socio-cognitive theory of Bandura, as adequacy, efficiency and competency feeling of an individual in life. One of the self-efficacy aspects of the person who takes care of an epileptic child is his management which is associated to his performance in personal, household and pharmaceutical responsibilities about the patient. So, this study underwent to gather the information about self-efficacy of mothers with epileptic child, from former studies. Methods:among articles published between 2000 and 2018 about self-efficacy of mothers with epileptic child in different databases including Iran medex, Iran doc, Iran journal information database, Academic Jihad scientific information database, Pubmed, Science Direct, Ovid and Elsevier using self-efficacy , epilepsy of children and parents as keywords, 20 assays had been selected for using in this survey. Exclusion criteria were not printing in prestigious magazine , being anonymous , being out of study time range and failure to access the full text of some articles . Findings:based on results from former studies, parents of children with epilepsy are faced with caring problems including how to handle the attacks, dealing with physical, social and mental problems and common questions about controlling seizures through various medications, side effects of medications and diet. Meanwhile, mothers as the main caregiver are heavily affected by their child s disease, as most of them have psychological problems and low self-efficacy in seizure management. Conclusion:Managing a child with epilepsy is very difficult and because of the inability of children to control attacks,this is often the responsibility of parents, especially the mother. Therefore, the ability and self-efficacy of the mother to control seizure is very important. Since nurses are in a unique position to interact with family members, they can identify the stressful effects of epilepsy on family members and provide interventions such as implementing family-centered empowerment programs with regard to educational and therapeutic needs, and encouraging mothers to participate actively in these programs. So, they can help to positive family adjustment and self-efficacy promotion.

Keywords:

epilepsy of children , self-efficacy , parents