Pathways Early ASD Intervention as a Moderator of Parenting Stress on Parenting Behaviors: A Randomized Control Trial.

Rollins et al. (2019) ran a 12-week telehealth parent-coaching program called Pathways Early ASD Intervention. They wanted to see if the program could protect parent-child interactions when parents started out highly stressed. Families were randomly placed into Pathways or usual community services.

The team measured parenting stress and how warm and responsive parents were during play at the start and end of the study.

Parents who got Pathways dropped their stress and kept high levels of warmth and responsiveness no matter how stressed they were at baseline. Parents in the control group stayed stressed and became less responsive when their initial stress was high.

In short, Pathways acted like a shield: it stopped stress from eroding good parenting.

The finding backs up Plant et al. (2007), an earlier in-home trial that also showed parent training can lower stress and improve parenting for preschoolers with developmental delays. Pathways moves the same idea onto Zoom.

Wainer et al. (2021) and Andrews et al. (2021) ran similar telehealth parent-coaching RCTs. All three studies report lower parent stress and better parent skills, giving a small pile of evidence that remote coaching works.

Porter et al. (2025) extend the story to toddlers. Their 6-month parent TEACCH program also cut stress and lifted child social skills, showing the stress-buffer effect holds across different ages and models.

You can now tell funders and families that a short, fully remote program keeps stressed parents responsive. If a family is on a wait-list or lives far from clinic, offer Pathways-style coaching: weekly video calls, short clips of parent-child play, and praise for warm moments. The data say you do not need to wait until stress is gone to protect the relationship.