Student-Parents’ Challenges in Nursing School

Abstract

Student-parents, those learners who have to care for their children, manage to carry out studies, child-rearing, and more often gainful employment, are peculiarly placed in a way that may affect their performance as well as other areas of their lives. This paper is focused on designing a learning guide to facilitate the student-parent learning of their roles in managing overlapping roles. In the present study, there is a concern with working students and/or parents but little attention has been given to lived experiences of working students and parents combined. This study addresses that gap by exploring student parents’ management of time, roles, and stress. Only eight participants were chosen for the study with a purposive sampling technique adopted; four male and four female participants were interviewed using the developed self-administered two-part questionnaire. An attempt was made to reduce the data collected through Colaizzi’s method to fundamental experiential characteristics and seek out significant themes. These indicate many challenges, including time management and role conflicts, whereby there is often a need to compromise health and academic achievements. The lack of formal support structures also intensified these challenges; however, participants’ defiance revealed functional coping mechanisms such as pragmaticism in task orientation, family and peer support, and limited availability of supportive campus resources. These six themes offer a clear and all-around view of student-parents' challenges: These results imply that appropriate support needs to be provided, as well as efficient strategies and policies that embrace the diversity of the environmental context in education in their facilities and especially in nursing schools. School administrators can apply specific strategic policies based on the study’s recommendations concerning student-parents to enhance learning and overall success, or lack thereof, of student-parents.