Exploring the Components of Stress Responses in Parents of Children with and without ASD

Background:  Parenting stress is a complex process that includes external parenting demands, parent-child relationship quality, as well as the emotional and social well-being of parent and child. Parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) report the highest levels of stress, above and beyond parents of children with typical development and Developmental Disabilities (Carter & Davis, 2008). Previous research focuses primarily on understanding the predictors of parenting stress (e.g. child problem behavior), yet few investigate the various components of stress (e.g. stress related to perceptions of parenting role, physiological markers).

Objectives:  Primary aims include the examination of group differences in 5 facets of parent stress. We predict parents of children with ASD will demonstrate higher levels across all measures.

Methods:  Participants included 37 mothers (mean age = 39.24 years, 4.94 years SD) of children ages 7 to 12 years (64% male) with and without an ASD diagnosis. While wearing a heart rate monitor, mothers watched a neutral 3-minute baseline video. Self-report measures included 3 subscales (Parental Distress, Parent Child Dysfunctional Interaction, Difficult Child) from the Parenting Stress Index Short Form (PSI-SF; Abidin, 1990) to assess the components of parenting stress, Perceived Stress Responsivity Scale (PSRS; Schlotz, Yim, Zoccola, Jansen, & Schulz, 2011) to assess perceived responses to daily stressful situations, and baseline RMSSD to assess vagally mediated heart rate variability indexing flexible emotional responding to stress.

Results: Due to multiple post-hoc comparisons, ANOVA was utilized with Bonferroni correction. Results revealed significantly higher perceived stress related to parent child interactions reported by parents of children with versus without ASD (p = .007). Group differences in the remaining components of stress were not significant at the p = .01 level.

Conclusions:  This study adds insight to the literature on increased stress in parents of children with ASD. We sought to identify differences in specific components of stress between parents of children with and without ASD as potential areas of focus for future treatment targets. Results reveal no differences in perceived stress reactivity, HRV, as well as stress related to the parenting role or mother’s perception of child difficulty. The only significant difference in stress involved the extent to which the mother perceived interactions with her child to be unsatisfying. This finding demonstrates an important factor to identify and target in parent-mediated treatments. Approaches that address parental stress, such as mindfulness based treatments, may be especially useful for targeting negative perceptions of child expectations during parent-child interactions and help lead to more satisfying mother-child experiences.