Physical and socio-emotional quality of life in parents of children with classic galactosemia who participated in a proactive speech/language intervention: Mothers experience a lower quality of life compared to fathers

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the quality of life in the participating families of the Babble Boot Camp. The Babble Boot Camp provides speech therapy for children with classic galactosemia starting as early as two months old. The child’s speech progress is evaluated along with other metrics such as parental and child stress levels and quality of life. In this study, the quality of life of the participants in the Babble Boot Camp was evaluated using the Pediatric Quality of Life questionnaire (Varni, 1998). A comparative study was conducted between mothers and fathers, families with children with classic galactosemia, and with typically developing children, and the effects of speech therapy earlier in a child’s life versus later. The questions looked into in this study were if mothers and fathers report different quality of life scores, if there is a correlation between the scores the children have for the quality of life and the scores the parents received for the quality of life, differences in quality of life scores of parents with children with classic galactosemia and parents with typically developing children, and if the quality of life scores of parents and children improve in the Babble Boot Camp. The main results were that mothers report a lower quality of life than fathers, mothers have a stronger correlation with their children in regards to their quality of life scores, parents with children with classic galactosemia have a lower quality of life scores than parents with typically developing children and parents and children who were in the group who received speech therapy from earlier have a higher quality of life scores than the late group.