"A Little Too Helicoptery": Reconciling Parental Involvement During Autistic Students' Transitions into College

Background: Parents have long held an important role in their autistic children's lives. As autistic individuals enroll in higher education institutions at much higher rates, new issues emerge. In particular, autistic college students and their parents must reconcile the major transition with the extent to which parents must be involved and exert their influence.Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This phenomenological study set in a community college aimed to answer this question: How do autistic students, their parents, and college staff make meaning of parental involvement during autistic students' transitions into postsecondary education? Parental involvement is of great relevance not only to autism-specific college support programs, such as the one featured in this study that helps students and parents negotiate these relationships, but also to colleges writ large. To disentangle the nuanced elements of parental involvement, I incorporated interdependence theory that explores the impacts of each stakeholder group's outcomes on one another. Uncovering these dynamics may help in identifying realistic solutions that honor stakeholders' various priorities and allow autistic students to leverage greater agency in their college journeys.Research Design: This study was set in a community college boasting an autism-specific college support program featuring programming to support autistic learners in their college experiences, inclusive of issues around independence and advocacy. Employing a descriptive phenomenological approach allowed for deconstructing the nuanced interactions among parents, adult autistic children navigating college, and college staff. Here parental involvement served as the phenomenon of focus. Participants included 13 autistic college students, 5 mothers, and 15 college staff. Students engaged in surveys, interviews, observations, and written reflections, whereas mothers and college staff participated in interviews.Conclusions/Recommendations: Parents and their children-autistic college students-must constantly re-evaluate and recalibrate their relationships as students gradually gain more independence. This study illuminates how institutional supports and stakeholders, including those associated with the autism-specific college support program, enable autistic college students to demonstrate growth in their agency. This study puts forward many recommendations for varied stakeholders, including, but not limited to, elevating self-advocacy training in forming students' transition plans (high school personnel) and engaging in role-playing activities (parents and children). Regarding future research, takeaways call for longitudinal work to track autistic students' distinct presentations of independence over time, as well as embedding journals or other reflective materials for parents to make sense of their communication patterns with their children.