Coping The Coping Health Inventory for Parents (CHIP) (McCubbin et al. 1979) was used to measure parental coping. CHIP is a self-report instrument consisting of a checklist of 45 items to assess parents’ perceptions of the behaviours they are currently using to manage family life when they have a child who is seriously and/or chronically ill. CHIP consists of three patterns: Pattern I (Family integration, co-operation and an optimistic definition of the situation), Pattern II (Maintaining social support, self-esteem and psychological stability), and Pattern III (Understanding the health care situation through communication with other parents and consultation with health care team). In this study, to reduce the confounding effect of social support items in CHIP, six items related to use of social support were deleted from coping pattern II. The 39 items in the total reduced scale had a standardized Cronbach’s a of 0Æ86 for mothers and 0Æ90 for fathers in this study. Both parents in the sample completed this instrument andcopingpatternsforeachparentwereexaminedseparately.