Coping over time: the parents of children with autism.
Parents of kids with autism naturally drop service-hunting and pick up emotion and faith-based coping—training can hurry that shift.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Gray (2006) followed a small group of U.S. parents who have children with autism.
For about ten years the team asked open questions about how the moms and dads handled daily stress.
No treatment was given; the goal was to see how coping choices changed as the child grew.
What they found
Parents slowly stopped waiting for outside services to fix problems.
They also pulled back from avoiding friends and family.
Instead they leaned on prayer, journaling, and talking with each other to manage feelings.
How this fits with other research
Fahmie et al. (2013) pooled many studies and showed these same parents feel far more stress than other moms and dads.
That big-picture number helps explain why the shift E saw matters.
Samadi et al. (2013) ran a short parent class in Iran and quickly raised problem-focused coping—the very style E saw appear naturally after years.
The class gives you a way to speed up the timeline parents otherwise walk alone.
Chao et al. (2018) mapped five early stages Taiwanese parents move through, starting with frantic service hunting.
E’s work picks up where that map ends, showing what happens when families keep going.
Why it matters
You can save parents a decade of trial and error.
Start teaching emotion-focused and problem-solving skills early, not just behavior plans for the child.
Check if both partners use positive dyadic coping, because Sim et al. (2017) show that protects their bond.
When you see parents turning to prayer or family rituals, support it—E found that move predicts steadier mood long-term.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Although coping with autism has been examined in a number of papers, virtually no research exists on how families cope over time. This paper reports the results of a longitudinal study of parents coping with autism over a period of approximately a decade. METHODS: The research method for the study was based on ethnographic methods that emphasized in-depth interviews and participant observation. The sample for this study consisted of 28 parents (19 mothers and nine fathers) of children with autism. The instrument for the interviews consisted of questions concerning: the child's medical history and referral experience, the child's present symptomatology, the effects of the child's problems on the parent's well-being, the effects of autism on the family's social life, parental coping strategies, illness conceptualization and the parents' expectations for the future. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Coping strategies changed from the time of the initial study, as fewer parents coped through reliance on service providers, family support, social withdrawal and individualism and relatively more parents coped through their religious faith and other emotion-focused strategies. The results tentatively support previous research on coping that indicates that aging is linked to the use of more emotion-focused coping strategies.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2006 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2006.00933.x