Developmental delays in emotion regulation strategies in preschoolers with autism.
Autistic preschoolers need extra practice to use calm-down tools with anyone who isn’t mom or dad.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team watched 3- to young learners during a short separation from parents.
Half of the kids had autism, half were neurotypical.
They counted how often each child used calm-down moves like asking for help, talking about feelings, or hugging a toy.
What they found
With mom or dad, both groups used the same number of calm-down moves.
With a new adult, autistic kids used far fewer helpful strategies.
The gap shows delay, not a different path: they have the skills but don’t use them with strangers.
How this fits with other research
Nuebling et al. (2024) meta-analysis pools 100+ studies and confirms autistic people of all ages show more emotion dysregulation.
Ben Hassen et al. (2023) found the same pattern still holds in adults, adding that trouble reading body cues plays a role.
de Graaf et al. (2011) seems to disagree: infants later diagnosed with autism were rated as more, not less, distressed.
The difference is age and focus: babies show raw distress, preschoolers show lack of strategies; both point to early regulation problems.
Why it matters
You can’t assume a child who copes with mom will cope at preschool.
Program the same calm-down scripts you teach at home into community settings: practice asking the teacher for a break, choosing a coping toy, or labeling feelings.
Start with the parent present, then fade them out and add new adults until the skill sticks.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
UNLABELLED: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) commonly present with difficulty regulating negative emotions, which has been found to impact their behavioral and mental health. Little research has documented the strategies that children with ASD use to regulate their emotion to understand whether they use qualitatively different strategies to children without ASD, whether these are developmentally delayed, or both. Forty-four children with ASD and 29 typically-developing children (2-4 years) were given tasks designed to mimic everyday life experiences requiring children to manage low-level stress (e.g., waiting for a snack) and children's emotion regulation strategies were coded. Parents reported on their child's mental health, wellbeing, and self-development. The results suggest differences in using emotion regulation strategies in children with ASD, reflecting a delay, rather than a deviance when compared to those used by children without ASD. Only children with ASD relied on their family members for physical and communicative soothing; the typically developing children relied on people outside of their family for help regulating their emotion. More frequent approach/less frequent avoidance was related to a higher self-evaluation in both groups, but was only additionally related to higher self-recognition and autonomy in the ASD group. These findings help to identify important emotion regulation intervention targets for this population, including supporting communication with people outside of the family and independence. Autism Res 2017, 10: 1808-1822. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Results suggest that children with autism had more difficulty using communication strategies to manage stress only with people outside the family; they used these strategies with family members as often as children without autism. For all children, more task approach/less avoidance was related to children's higher self-evaluation. These findings suggest targeting communication with people outside of the family and personality development as appropriate intervention goals.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2017 · doi:10.1002/aur.1827