Mental health, broad autism phenotype and psychological inflexibility in mothers of young children with autism spectrum disorder in Australia: A cross-sectional survey.
Mothers of young autistic kids who show more autistic traits and less psychological flexibility report higher depression, anxiety, and stress because everyday parenting feels tougher.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Kulasinghe et al. (2021) sent an online survey to Australian mums of young autistic kids.
They asked about autistic traits, psychological flexibility, parenting challenges, and mental-health symptoms.
The team then used statistics to see which traits best predicted stress, anxiety, and depression.
What they found
Mothers who scored high on autistic traits and low on flexibility reported the most depression, anxiety, and stress.
Parenting challenges acted as the middle link: rigid thinking made everyday care feel harder, and harder care then fed poor mental health.
How this fits with other research
Navot et al. (2016) first showed the same link using interviews instead of surveys. Their mums with flexible thinking kept planning more kids after diagnosis, while rigid thinkers stopped.
Hayse et al. (2025) add another parent-load factor: up-and-down nightly sleep, not just short sleep, predicts daily fatigue in autism parents.
Underwood Carrasco et al. (2026) flip the lens to providers. They found anxious parents leave diagnosis meetings feeling worse unless the clinician is warm and clear. Together the four papers map both inside-the-parent and outside-the-parent risks.
Why it matters
You cannot change a mum’s personality, but you can build psychological flexibility. Brief ACT modules, values cards, or five-minute defusion drills during parent training give mums tools to notice rigid thoughts and choose workable action. When care feels less hard, mental-health scores drop. Start small: add one flexibility exercise to your next parent meeting and track parent stress before and after.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Mothers of children with autism tend to have poorer mental health outcomes compared to most mothers. Lack of social support, parenting challenges and relationship difficulties are more common for mothers of children with autism and can all affect maternal mental health. Mothers of children with autism are also more likely to have some autistic features, called the broad autism phenotype, that can contribute to poorer mental health; however, how these factors relate to one another are unclear. This study found that mothers who were less flexible in their thinking and behaviour and had more difficult parenting experiences tended to have poorer mental health. Mothers with more autistic features were less flexible in their thinking and behaviour, which, in turn, was linked to greater symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress. Mothers with greater autistic features also reported more difficult parenting experiences, which was in turn linked with greater symptoms of anxiety and depression. This study suggests that supporting mothers of young children with autism to manage parenting challenges and become more flexible with their thinking and behaviour could help to improve their mental health.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2021 · doi:10.1177/1362361320984625