PARENTS AND THEIR CHILDREN ON THE AUTISM SPECTRUM: IDENTIFYING FACTORS THAT PREDICT HOW MUCH THEY AGREE ON MENTAL HEALTH FACTORS
Eastin, Camille
Eastin, Camille
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2023-05-19
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Anxiety and depression are highly prevalent among autistic children and adolescents, making it vital that parents accurately assess their child on the autism spectrum's mental well-being. The present study compared parent and child reports of 119 mother-autistic child dyads and father-autistic child dyads to determine whether parent mental well-being, autistic characteristics, or gender differences affected parent-child disagreement about the child's anxiety and depressive symptoms. The children were between the ages of 10 and 17 and were not diagnosed with any co-occurring intellectual disabilities. The results suggest that higher father depression was a significant predictor of higher father-child disagreement over the child's depressive symptoms. Increased autistic characteristics in fathers increased disagreement in father-child dyads regarding the child's anxiety symptoms. Finally, mothers disagreed more with their daughters than their sons about their child's anxiety symptoms. The current study identified parent-level factors that are only significant within one gender of parent, emphasizing a need for more research that includes both fathers and mothers. Future research should recruit a more diverse sample from various cultural and economic backgrounds and a higher proportion of families with autistic daughters to investigate the significant findings about mother- daughter disagreement patterns. Assessing disagreement trends in mother-autistic child and father-autistic child dyads may be expanded in novel studies to investigate future implications on childhood outcomes of parent-child disagreement in autistic samples.
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Psychology