Predictors of Insightfulness in Mothers of Children with Autism

Background: Maternal insightfulness is a mother's ability to consider a child’s thoughts and feelings and to relate that information to the child’s behavior while discussing actual mother-child interactions.  Insightfulness has been linked to mothers’ synchronous behavior during play with children with autism (Hutman, Siller, & Sigman, in review).  Maternal insightfulness has also been linked with sensitive caregiving behavior and children’s quality of attachment in a non-clinical population (Koren-Karie, Oppenheim, Dolev, Sher, et al., 2002). In mothers of children with autism, insightfulness was not related to the child’s chronological age, language or non-verbal IQ.  Furthermore, classification on the Insightfulness Assessment was not related to mothers' age, ethnicity, years of education, or household income (Hutman, Siller, & Sigman, in review).

Objectives: To enrich current understanding of insightfulness in mothers of children with autism and to explore links with other maternal social cognitions including perceptions of stress, social support, gratification and efficacy in parenting. We hypothesized that Positively Insightful mothers would report less stress, more social support, more gratification and efficacy from parenting than non-insightful (One-Sided and Disengaged) mothers.

Methods: Participants were biological mothers of sixty-seven children with autism under the age of seven.  Autism diagnoses were confirmed, cognitive and language development were assessed, and mother-child interactions were filmed during two visits to our research lab.  Two-minute video clips from these interactions were the basis of the Insightfulness Assessment (Koren-Karie & Oppenheim, 1997), which was conducted in families’ homes an average of 19 days after the second lab visit.   The following social cognition questionnaires were completed after the interview had been conducted: Clarke modification of Holroyd’s Questionnaire on Resources and Stress (QRS-Clarke; Konstantareous et al., 1992); the Perceived Social Support from Family Scale (Procidano & Heller, 1983); the Parenting Sense of Competence Scale (Gibaud-Wallston & Wandersman, 1978). 

Results: Hypotheses were tested with one-tailed t-tests.  Positively Insightful mothers (n = 23; 34.3%) reported less stress overall than One-Sided mothers (n = 21; 31.3%), with differences in the domains of family sharing; sacrifice; time demands; and family enrichment.  Positively Insightful mothers reported higher levels of efficacy than One-Sided mothers. Positively Insightful mothers perceived higher levels of social support than Disengaged mothers (n = 23; 34.3%). P values were less than 0.05.

Conclusions: Individual differences in mothers’ responses to the Insightfulness Assessment are associated with measures of perceived stress, efficacy, and social support.  Mothers whose narratives about their child with autism were classified as Positively Insightful report less stress, more efficacy in the parenting role, and more support from family than non-insightful mothers.  These findings suggest targets for interventions that aim to enhance mothers’ ability to take their child’s perspective, a skill that has been associated with improved language development in children with autism (Siller & Sigman, 2002; 2008).