Parental Insightfulness: Contributions to Mother-Father-Child Interactions in Families With Young Children With Autism

• In Event: Parenting and children's mental health

Abstract

Parental insightfulness - namely, seeing things from the child's point of view - underlies parental sensitive behavior and is associated with secure attachment among Typically Developing (TD) children (e.g., Koren-Karie et al., 2002). Subsequent studies revealed that, although it may be more challenging for parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to read the signals of their children, the same associations are evident: Insightful mothers of preschoolers with ASD are more sensitive during interactions with the children than non-insightful mothers and the children are more likely to be secure (Oppenheim et al., 2012).
One limitation of this research is its dyadic focus, because children develop in wider family contexts. To address this limitation, we observed mother-father-child interactions with children with ASD employing the Lausanne Triadic Play (LTP; Fivaz-Depeursinge & Corboz-Warnery, 1999) procedure which assesses the level of family cooperation. The hypothesis was that similar to mother-child interaction studies, parental insightfulness of both parents will promote interactions that are more attuned to the child, resulting in more cooperative interactions. This hypothesis received support in a previous study with TD preschoolers: when both parents were insightful, familial interactions were more cooperative than when only one or none of the parents were insightful (Marcu et al., 2016). Our current study examined whether this association is also evident when the child has ASD, and whether children's IQ might moderate this association.
Eighty preschoolers with ASD and both of their parents were observed in the LTP. Mothers and fathers were interviewed using the Insightfulness Assessment, in which parents are interviewed (individually) about their children's thoughts and feelings after viewing brief video clips of their interactions with their children. Interview transcripts are subsequently coded as insightful or non-insightful.
Preliminary analyses revealed that the level of cooperation among families with children with ASD with IQs equal or above 70 was not different than that among families with TD children, but for families with children with ASD with IQ < 70 it was lower, pointing to the impact of the developmental level of child on family interaction. Regarding the IA: No differences in insightfulness between parents of TD and ASD children were found, suggesting that parents can show insightfulness even when children's cognitive level is low.
Partially supporting the study's hypothesis, the associations between parental insightfulness and family interaction among families with a child with ASD were identical to those of families with TD children: When both parents were insightful, the family interaction was more cooperative, but this was only true for children with IQ>70. When children's IQ was lower than 70, there was no association between insightfulness and family interaction. These findings highlight the importance of adopting a triadic perspective in studies of parent-child interaction in ASD and in further investigating the role of parental insightfulness. They also suggest that low cognitive functioning (rather than the ASD diagnosis by itself) can constrain the expected association between insightfulness and family interaction, and raise the question what shapes family cooperation when children’s IQs are lower than 70.

Authors

• David Oppenheim, University of Haifa
  Presenting Author

• Nina Koren-Karie

• Michal Slonim

• Lior Hamburger

• Yael Maccabi

• Nurit Yirmiya