Parenting Stress in Families of Children With ASD and DD: A Multidimensional Perspective.
Niki Bahri, Laura Lee McIntyre, Cameron Neece
Parents of 3-to-5-year-olds with autism and with other developmental delays reported similar stress levels across three measures.
What predicted stress was not the diagnosis but a mix of the child's behavior, adaptive skills, and family circumstances like income and siblings with problems.
Key findings
1Across all three parenting-stress dimensions (general distress, daily hassles, child impact on family), there were no significant differences between the autism group and the other-developmental-delay group.
2In the autism group, younger child age, lower daily living skills, and having a partner in the home were associated with higher general distress; in the final regression model only child age remained significant.
3In the autism group, externalizing behavior and household income remained significant predictors of daily parenting hassles in the final model; in the DD group, externalizing behavior and a secondary condition remained significant.
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What it does not show
Cross-sectional design: associations cannot be read as cause-and-effect. A child's behavior problems and a parent's stress may influence each other, and this snapshot cannot tell which came first. All participants were aged 3 to 5, so the findings do not extend to school-age or older children whose stressors look different. The sample was restricted to high-stress parents (above the 73rd or 85th percentile on the PSI-SF), which limits variability and may have made it harder to detect group differences. Stigma and cultural factors were not directly measured, despite the sample including monolingual Spanish-speaking families. The study is drawn from a larger RCT, but the analyses presented here are correlational, not intervention outcomes.
Declared interests
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. No specific funding source is named in the text provided.
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