Creating satisfaction: a psychological perspective on stress and coping in families of handicapped children.

This paper briefly reviews the literature on stress and coping in families of developmentally handicapped children and proposes an alternative way for conceptualizing some of the psychological processes involved. The approach specifies how threats to certain human needs lead to predictable patterns of appraisal and coping. The usefulness of this alternative is demonstrated for families of autistic children and the theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.