Effects of Parent-Implemented Interventions on Outcomes of Children with Autism: A Meta-Analysis.

Only three of the 54 included articles were unpublished, so the authors could not rule out that trials with null results were never submitted for publication. The average child was 5.5 years old and samples were overwhelmingly boys, so the review says little about older children or about girls. No study followed children long term, so nothing here shows whether the gains hold once the intervention stops. Reporting was poor in many trials: 39% did not measure or report treatment fidelity, 43% did not report whether parents' own skills improved, a third gave no information on allocation concealment, and 57% did not report intention-to-treat analyses. Studies that took more care to reduce bias found smaller effects, so the headline average is likely to be an optimistic figure. Only nine studies came from non-English-speaking countries, so the findings speak mainly to families in North America, Europe and Australia. Because so much information was missing, the failure to find any moderator effect may reflect poor reporting rather than a genuine absence of differences. The search and coding stopped in 2020, so work published since then is not included.

The supplied text contains no funding statement and no conflict-of-interest declaration, so there is nothing to report on who paid for or designed this work.

Do not read this as evidence that parents can replace professional therapy. Only one of the 51 studies compared a parent-delivered intervention against one delivered by professionals; the rest compared it with a waiting list, treatment as usual, or parent support without an active intervention.