Early evidence of the use of the Pediatric Inventory for Parents (PIP) in Italian mothers and fathers of children with asthma and cancer

Stress is tightly linked to health outcomes, and can arise in any population for an array of different reasons. When its main cause is the everyday strain of taking care of one child or multiple children, parents are said to be suffering parenting stress. Measuring this construct can be useful when treating patients that have children, however, it is of little use when the main trigger of their distress is their child being affected by a chronic illness. This occurrence, named pediatric parenting stress, has proven time and time again to necessitate a tailored framework and specific tools to be understood efficiently. In fact, the needs of chronically ill children and their families are peculiar to them and have unique outcomes in the family dynamic. Among the few measures developed to investigate this phenomenon, the Pediatric Inventory for Parents (PIP) seems to be the most robust, developed at the turn of the millennium by Randi Streisand and colleagues. Its underlying conceptualisation of stress is that of Lazarus and Folkman, according to which stress arises based on the individual’s perception of events: appraisal of such events as threatening or harmful categorises them as distressing, and starts a chain of coping strategies in order to manage the negative emotions caused by the stressor. The PIP has proven itself to be a useful and solid instrument to measure pediatric parenting stress, and has been translated into several languages. The aim of the present study is to obtain a first evaluation of the Italian short form PIP, the first step towards achieving a psychometrically sound Italian version of the questionnaire. This work will specifically discuss the Italian PIP’s validity and internal consistency. Furthermore, it will investigate correlations between overall psychological wellbeing and the PIP, as well as how demographic variables and psychological adaptation can influence overall wellbeing in these families.