Parental Coping as a Buffer Between Child Factors and Emotion-Related Parenting in Families of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience high levels of stress related to their children's symptoms and comorbid behavior problems. Adaptive parental coping in response to child-related stressors is proposed to serve a buffering function, and yet, little research has examined whether coping actually moderates associations between child factors and parent outcomes in this population. The few studies to do so have focused on parent well-being as the primary outcome and have not considered the degree to which child-related stressors may affect parenting and contribute to maladaptive transactional parent-child processes over time. The present study tested whether adaptive parental coping was associated with reduced associations between higher levels of child ASD symptoms and comorbid externalizing problems and poorer quality parent reactions to child negative emotions in 63 families of children with ASD. Parents reported on their children's externalizing problems, their own coping behavior, and their reactions to their children's negative emotions, and child ASD symptoms were measured through direct testing. Adaptive coping-primarily active planning-moderated the association between children's behavior problems and supportive parent reactions such that parents of children with more externalizing problems reported less supportive reactions, but only when adaptive coping was low. Child ASD symptoms did not significantly relate to parent reactions, and coping did not moderate these associations. This cross-sectional study is the first to identify parental coping as a potential protective factor for parenting behavior in families of children with ASD and comorbid behavior problems. Implications for future longitudinal research are discussed.