Observing Autistic Family Relationships: a Pilot Study on Support Intervention to Parents and Their Children

Background: Recently, some contributions have highlighted the negative effect of parental stress upon the efficacy of interventions oriented towards the child with an Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), who shows increasingly more behavioural problems at the parents’ increase of stress level  (Osborne et al., 2008).

Objectives: Our study is aimed to assess the efficacy of a psychological support to parents and their children in terms of observed and perceived improvements in the quality of relationships.

Methods: 7 families of children with an ASD (6 males and 1 female; mean chron. age= 7 yrs and 7 month; SD=3 years; mean IQ= 89.83; SD= 27.92) were assessed before and after a supportive intervention through a standardized observational procedure: the “Clinical Lausanne Trialogue Play” used as a measure of the change as regards the family’s affective and behavioural functioning. Individual, from 0 (not adequate) to 2 (fully adequate), and family codes, from 0 (fully dysfunctional) to 40 (fully functional) were scored.

Results: At the beginning of intervention, the mean score was 20.14 (s.d. 4.02), within the dysfunctional alliances range; up to now, we found among 4 follow ups a significant difference (2-tailed paired t test; P= 0.0469; DF= 3) after intervention; the mean increased to 24 (s.d.= 3.65), placing families within stressed but functional alliances. Moreover, the intervention improved the compliance between parents and the professionals involved in the multi-disciplinary care of the child.

Conclusions: the study emphasizes the need to involve personally the parents and to consider their feelings and worries for their child in order to ameliorate the ability to share feelings and to develop inter-subjectivity processes.