Chronic Parenting Stress in Parents of Children with Autism: Associations with Chronic Stress in Their Child and Parental Mental and Physical Health.
Parent and child stress are biologically linked in autism families, so treat both together.
01Research in Context
What this study did
van der Lubbe et al. (2025) asked parents of children with autism to fill out surveys and give a small hair sample. The team used the hair to measure cortisol, a stress hormone that builds up over months.
They wanted to see if parents' long-term stress matched their child's stress and the parents' own health problems.
What they found
Parents who had higher hair cortisol also reported higher stress and more mental health problems. Their children tended to have higher hair cortisol too.
The only physical health link was in moms: higher stress went with higher blood glucose.
How this fits with other research
Goodwin et al. (2012) showed that parent stress and child behavior problems feed each other over time. Anna's team adds the biological proof: the stress loop shows up in hair cortisol.
Samadi et al. (2012) reviewed stigma in families like these and found mostly interview evidence. The new study gives a concrete body measure—cortisol—that stigma and daily pressure may help explain.
Amiri et al. (2020) looked way back at prenatal risk factors. Anna shifts the lens to right now: once autism is diagnosed, parent and child stress still rise together.
Why it matters
You now have a simple, cheap marker—hair cortisol—to spot families under heavy chronic load. If both parent and child levels are high, treat the whole system: teach parents stress skills while you work on the child's behavior.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Parents of children with ASD often demonstrate high levels of stress and associated health problems. A gap in knowledge exists regarding the associations between chronic stress and mental and physical health of parents of young children with ASD, in which fathers have been understudied. In 181 parents (98 mothers, 83 fathers) of 99 young children with ASD chronic stress was measured using parental self-report and hair cortisol concentration (HCC) analysis. Parental mental health and eating behavior was measured using questionnaires. Physical health was evaluated by Body Mass Index, waist circumference, blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides, and glucose.. Parental HCC was related with child HCC (rmothers = 0.51, p <.01; rfathers = 0.40, p <.01). Maternal HCC was associated with lower reported parenting stress (r = -.33, p <.01). Parental mental health problems and reported parenting stress were strongly related (r =.55-0.61, p <.01). Mental health problems were twice as frequent as in the norm-population (41.1-45.8% versus 20%). In both parents, reported parenting stress was associated with emotional eating behavior. HCC was associated with higher glucose levels in mothers. There were no associations between chronic stress and the other physical health measures in mothers and fathers. Parents of young children with ASD are at high risk for chronic stress, with impact for their mental and physical health. Additionally, chronic stress of parents, cannot be perceived isolated from the stress in their children with ASD. We encourage future research to investigate whether these correlations are generalizable to the whole ASD population.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025 · doi:10.1111/obr.13376