Brief Report: Stress and Perceived Social Support in Parents of Children with ASD
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BRIEF REPORT
Brief Report: Stress and Perceived Social Support in Parents of Children with ASD Kateryna Drogomyretska1 · Robert Fox2 · Dylan Colbert1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Previous literature has indicated that perceptions of social support (PSS) may be an important predictor of parental stress levels, particularly for parents of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The current study implemented structural equation modelling to further investigate the relationship between PSS and parental stress in a sample of 454 parents of children diagnosed with ASD. Results indicate that PSS derived from friends was the most important factor in protecting against stress, with PSS from both a significant other and family appearing to be less pervasive in this regard. In addition, the importance of PSS was further underlined by the finding that it remained a significant predictor of parental stress after controlling for the absence/presence of professional support. Keywords Autism spectrum disorder · Social support · Stress · Structural equation modeling · Parental stress · Professional support
Introduction One of the most common disorders currently being diagnosed in children is Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), with estimates of prevalence ranging from .7 to 3.3% across the United States and Europe (Baio 2012; Baio et al. 2018; Christensen et al. 2016; Irish Department of Health 2018; Kim et al. 2011; Waugh 2017; Zablotsky et al. 2015). Due to the unique developmental, behavioural and social challenges associated with ASD, parents of diagnosed children tend to report higher levels of stress than parents of neurotypical children (Barroso et al. 2018; Estes et al. 2009; Johnson et al. 2009; Lee et al. 2017; Montes and Halterman 2007; Phetrasuwan and Shandor Miles 2009; Rivard et al. 2014) and children with other intellectual or developmental disorders (Griffith et al. 2010; Gupta 2007; Schieve et al. 2007). Parental stress and child developmental/behavioural issues have been proposed to interact in a bidirectional or transactional manner across childhood (Baker et al. 2003; Belsky * Dylan Colbert [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Dublin Business School, 73/83 South Georges Street, Dublin 2, Ireland
Department of Psychology, Maynooth University, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland
2
1984; Gottlieb 2007; Neece et al. 2012; Sameroff 2009). While the exact mechanism underpinning this relationship has been challenged (see Totsika et al. 2013), elevated parental stress levels can encourage poorer adaptive functioning (Cuzzocrea et al. 2016; Hall and Graff 2011, 2012) and thus may serve to exacerbate core and comorbid symptomology associated with ASD. Social support has been found to be an important protective factor against parental stress and its entailed issues when raising neurotypical children (Farel and Hooper 1998; Koeske and Koeske 1990; Saisto et al. 2008) and children with additional needs, such as autism (Halstead et al. 2018;
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