Research has consistently demonstrated that parenting a child with autism can lead to increased perceived stress for parents. This stress may be affected by a number of variables such as the severity of the child’s autism symptoms and the difficulty accessing essential services. There may also exist a complex pattern of interaction among these variables. Parental coping and level of hopefulness may mitigate this stress in some way. Furthermore, some parents may actually demonstrate personal growth as a result of parenting for a child with a pervasive and chronic condition such as autism.
The current study investigated several questions: (1) Is symptom severity associated with parenting stress? 2) Is access to services related to child clinical outcomes, parenting stress, and parental stress-related growth? 3) Do hopefulness and coping ability function as mediators of these relationships?
Thirty-eight parents of children with autism were obtained from a Cleveland Clinic autism patient registry. Parents were asked to complete several questionnaires related to access to services, specifically met and unmet service needs (Family Support Index; Heller and Factor, 1993), level of hopefulness (Adult Trait Hope Scale; Synder, 1991), coping (Coping Health Inventory for Parents; McCubbin et al., 1983), parenting stress (Parenting Stress Index-Short Form; Abidin, 1995), stress-related growth (Stress Related Growth Scale; Park et al., 1996), and child outcomes (Ohio Autism Clinical Impression Scale; Butter and Mulik, 2006)
Main results were that autism severity at diagnosis was not related to any variables. Current severity was related to parenting stress. As predicted, met service needs was significantly negatively related to child’s current level of severity. Results were that met service needs was significantly negatively related to parenting stress and significantly positively related to parental coping. Coping and met service needs were both significantly positively related to stress-related growth. This study did not find that coping and hopefulness functioned as mediators. This study is the first to examine the relationships among these variables with this population, and the findings have important implications for professionals serving these families.