The Son-Rise Program intervention for autism: an investigation into family experiences.
Parent belief in Son-Rise, not time spent, predicts whether families feel helped or harmed.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Clarke et al. (2003) sent surveys to families using the Son-Rise Program. They asked how the program changed life at home.
Parents rated benefits, drawbacks, and stress after about one year.
What they found
Most families said the program brought more hassles than help.
Yet stress did not rise for everyone. The big clue: parents who believed Son-Rise worked were the ones who felt better.
How this fits with other research
Ferguson et al. (2021) later showed stress drops most when ABA targets attention-driven behavior. Their data extend R’s point—parent outlook, not just hours, shapes stress.
Hsiao et al. (2017) found strong family-teacher ties lift quality of life and indirectly lower stress. Both papers agree with R: family perception is the lever, not the label of the therapy.
Casey et al. (2009) tracked daily stress long-term and also saw mixed patterns instead of steady climbs. Together these studies kill the myth that autism interventions always raise parent strain.
Why it matters
Before you add any home program, ask parents if they believe it will work. A skeptical parent will feel more strain even if the child makes gains. Spend five minutes building buy-in; it may protect the whole family more than extra therapy hours.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Despite the increasing involvement of parents as therapists in interventions for their children with autism, research to date has focused almost exclusively on the outcome for the child, and little is known about the effects of involvement on the whole family. This is true even of highly intensive home-based approaches such as the Son-Rise Program (SRP), the focus of the present paper. A longitudinal questionnaire-based study is reported which investigated a number of potential positive and negative effects for the family, how these changed over time, and their relation to child characteristics and patterns of intervention implementation. METHODS: Questionnaires examining family demographics, patterns of intervention use and perceived family effects were distributed three times over the course of a year to families who had attended an initial training course in the use of the SRP. RESULTS: The results indicated that, although involvement led to more drawbacks than benefits for the families over time, family stress levels did not rise in all cases. Few relationships were found between family effects and patterns of intervention use, although there was a strong connection with parental perceptions of intervention efficacy. CONCLUSIONS: The findings of the present study emphasize the need for those supporting families using home-based interventions to consider the needs of the whole family. This may be especially important if there are periods during which the family find the intervention to be less effective. Families embarking on such intensive approaches may also benefit from considering ways in which any disruption to family life can be minimized.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2003 · doi:10.1046/j.1365-2788.2003.00491.x