I like to write about all the positives that go along with being a special-needs mom. In an attempt to not to be disingenuous, I do try to touch on some of the harder aspects as well: things like watching younger kids outperform your child with special needs, being excluded, and dealing with a life filled with therapy and extra expenses.
It turns out that no matter how many benefits there are to raising a child with special needs (and there are more than several), there is one major downfall — most special-needs moms age faster than “normal” moms.
Doctors Elizabeth Blackburn and Elissa Eppel compared the DNA of mothers with children of normal ability to mothers of children with special needs and found that mothers of children with special needs, or children who are chronically ill, age prematurely — to the tune of about ten years.
So, why is this?
Dr. Blackburn and Dr. Eppel were able to make a connection to premature aging of the women’s cells and the amount of stress felt by the mothers through a thorough questionnaire. Nearly all mothers parenting special needs children admitted to large amounts of emotional distress.
Here is what they found:
Each cell has chromosomes. Each chromosome has little segments on the ends of their DNA called telomeres. A telomere is basically the powerhouse for the DNA, enabling the cell to replicate. As we age and our cells multiply, our telomeres get shorter.
So, doctors Blackburn and Eppel measured the lengths of 58 young and middle-aged mothers caring for children with special needs and found them to be genetically 10 years older than their chronological age.
Too bad for us moms, our husbands aren’t on board with the premature aging.
A study of over 600 couples, including both regular and special-needs families, found that dads faired similarly in both kinds of families. All the while, moms of children with special needs were twice as likely to have major mental or physical age-related health problems, like memory loss and stress-induced depression.
Professor and researcher Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn stated,
“When people are under stress, they look haggard, it’s like they age before your eyes, and there’s something going on at a molecular level.”
Photo credit: iStock, image adapted from Zappys Technology Solutions/Flickr.
