Caregiver concerns for autistic children differ between publicly funded educational and mental health settings: Findings from a community implementation-effectiveness trial.

The findings are based only on caregiver reports, so children's own concerns were not measured. The study did not include enough clinical detail about the children, such as intellectual ability or existing supports. Families may have used more than one service system, but that was not measured. Caregivers were enrolled through providers receiving training in an intervention, which may have made some concerns more salient. The analysis compares groups at baseline, so it cannot show that any intervention changed caregiver concerns. Some concerns could be coded under more than one category, especially internalizing and social communication problems.

No potential conflicts of interest were declared. Funding came from a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and National Institute of Mental Health grants R01MH111950 and R01MH111981.

Do not read these caregiver priorities as evidence that an intervention worked. This was baseline descriptive data, and many concerns were mental health-related rather than autism-specific.