Self-Compassion and Psychological Health of Parents: A Meta-Analysis Focused on Some Neurodevelopmental Disorders.
Teaching parents to be kind to themselves sharply cuts their depression and parenting stress.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Ozturk et al. (2025) pooled 15 studies on parents of kids with neurodevelopmental disorders.
They asked: Does self-compassion link to lower depression, lower stress, and higher well-being?
The team used meta-analysis to turn many small findings into one clear picture.
What they found
Parents who scored high on self-compassion felt much less depressed and less stressed.
They also reported much higher well-being.
The effect sizes were large, meaning the link is strong and worth acting on.
How this fits with other research
Cai et al. (2023) show autistic adults themselves also score low on self-compassion, so the problem spans generations.
Cai et al. (2024) gave autistic adults a five-week online self-compassion course and saw gains, proving the skill can be taught.
Lengua et al. (2025) ran a similar program with youth-service staff and saw the same pattern: self-compassion up, stress down.
Together these papers say self-compassion helps parents, staff, and autistic adults alike.
Why it matters
You can’t pour from an empty cup. When parents treat themselves with kindness, their own depression and stress drop. That means more energy for therapy carry-over and fewer cancelled sessions. Start small: add a two-minute self-compassion prompt at the end of parent training or send a nightly text reminder to breathe and speak kindly to themselves.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Parents of children with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) may face various psychological problems and experience parenting stress because of the nature of these disorders. Parents' psychological distress and high levels of parenting stress have a negative impact on their well-being. In addition, recent studies on the buffering effect of self-compassion related with psychological difficulties have also attracted attention. At this point, this study aims to carry out a meta-analytic review of studies examining the association between self-compassion and psychological distress, parenting stress, and well-being. Web of Science (WOS), Scopus, and EBSCOHost (APA PsycArticles, MEDLINE, TR Index, ERIC) electronic databases were searched in November 2023. Studies were included if they were quantitative and included parents of children with NDDs as the study population. As a result, 131 studies were obtained. After the duplicate studies were removed and evaluated according to the inclusion criteria, n = 15 were included. The random effects model was used to obtain the pooled effect sizes. The results showed that there was a large, negative, and significant relationship between self-compassion and parental depression score and parenting stress; a moderate, negative, and significant relationship between self-compassion and parental anxiety score; and a large, positive, and significant relationship between self-compassion and parental well-being. According to these findings, it is important to observe and measure the level of self-compassion for the well-being of parents of children with neurodevelopmental disorders. Moreover, increasing self-compassion in parents of children with neurodevelopmental disorders may be a protective factor for the psychological health of these parents.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025 · doi:10.1111/j.1469-7610.2010.02295.x