Linking Child Autism to Parental Depression and Anxiety: The Mediating Roles of Enacted and Felt Stigma.
Child autism symptoms wear down marriage through parenting stress and coparenting fights—so ease those two spots first.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Chan et al. (2021) asked 382 Hong Kong parents how child autism symptoms shape their marriage.
They used a model to test three links: child symptoms → parenting stress → coparenting conflict → marital love and conflict.
What they found
More child autism signs raised parenting stress. Higher stress sparked more coparenting fights.
Those fights then cut marital love and raised marital conflict. The whole chain was significant.
How this fits with other research
Chan et al. (2018) used the same families and showed child symptoms also feed parental depression through worry and money strain. The 2021 paper zooms in on the marriage piece and adds coparenting conflict as a key step.
Koegel et al. (2014) saw stigma hurting moms’ marital joy through caregiving burden. The new study keeps the stigma idea but swaps in parenting stress and coparenting spats as the active ingredients.
Wang et al. (2020) widened the lens to mainland China and found fathers’ stress drags down both partners’ family happiness. Chan et al. (2021) confirm stress harms couples, now within Hong Kong and with a clearer marital pathway.
Why it matters
When you write a family support plan, target parenting stress and coparenting battles, not just the child’s skills. Teach parents quick stress resets and run short coparenting meetings so they can back each other up. A calmer team protects the marriage while they help their child.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Research shows that parenting a child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with increased marital conflicts and reduced marital love. Less is known, however, about the potential mechanism underlying these associations. The present study tested a family process model linking child autism to parental marriage. We hypothesized that child autistic symptoms would be associated with increased marital conflicts and reduced marital love among parents of children with ASD, and that these associations would be mediated by parenting stress and coparenting conflicts. A total of 382 parents of children with ASD from Hong Kong, China completed questionnaire measures of child autistic symptoms, parenting stress, coparenting conflicts, marital conflicts, and marital love. Structural equation modeling (SEM) and Bootstrap analyses were conducted to analyze the relations among the variables. SEM showed that child autistic symptoms were related to higher levels of parenting stress and coparenting conflicts, which were, in turn, related to increased marital conflicts and reduced marital love among parents of children with ASD. Bootstrap analyses further demonstrated that child autistic symptoms had significant indirect effects on marital conflicts and marital love via parenting stress and coparenting conflicts. Theoretically, this study revealed the potential pathways through which child autism symptomatology may adversely impact the family processes and compromise the marital relationships of parents of children with ASD. Practically, this study pointed to the utility of helping parents of children with ASD to manage child autistic symptoms, alleviate parenting stress, and reduce coparenting conflicts in improving their marital qualities. LAY SUMMARY: This study showed that child autistic symptoms were related to higher levels of parenting stress and coparenting conflicts, which were, in turn, related to increased marital conflicts and reduced marital love among parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). These findings pointed to the importance of helping parents of children with ASD to manage child autistic symptoms, alleviate parenting stress, and reduce coparenting conflicts in improving their marital qualities. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Autism Res 2020, 13: 1516-1526. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2021 · doi:10.1002/aur.2297