Aspies For Freedom

Autistic Kids Benefit from Dads’ Involvement

Researchers have found that teaching fathers how to talk to and play with their autistic children in a home setting improved communication, increased the number of intelligible words the youngsters spoke by more than 50 percent and helped dads get more involved in their care.

Make room for daddy, say University of Florida autism experts. Teaching fathers how to communicate and play with their autistic children pays dividends, for parents and kids alike.

Autism is a developmental disability that typically appears during the first three years of life and is characterized by problems interacting and communicating with others. Caring for an autistic child can be a relentless and labor-intensive task — one that is overwhelmingly performed by mothers, says UF nursing researcher Jennifer Elder.

Now UF researchers have found that teaching fathers how to talk to and play with their autistic children in a home setting improved communication, increased the number of intelligible words the youngsters spoke by more than 50 percent and helped dads get more involved in their care. The findings were published in a recent issue of the journal Nursing Research.

“We found that fathers were getting frustrated because they felt they couldn’t connect with their autistic child,” said Elder, the study’s principal investigator and an associate professor and chairwoman of the department of health care environments and systems at UF’s College of Nursing. “During one of our sessions, a child made eye contact with his father and said ‘Daddy’ for the first time in the child’s life.

“Traditionally, mothers are the primary caretakers of autistic children,” Elder added. “Through our training, we caused a shift in the paradigm of many of these families, with fathers taking on a more active role with their autistic children, sometimes even taking the lead in caretaking.”

At least 1.5 million Americans have some form of autism, and it now affects one in every 166 births, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
UF researchers examined 18 father-child relationships before and after specialized training sessions. The families were recruited through UF’s Center for Autism and Related Disabilities and a community health practice in Central Florida and included 14 boys and four girls ranging in age from 3 years to 7 years old.

Building on a similar study of mothers of autistic children, Elder videotaped the father-child pairs in their homes during playtime sessions before training and at three key stages in the training process. The training emphasized language development and taught fathers to use everyday activities like playing with building blocks, puppets, cars and trucks, and bubbles to interact with their children.

UF researchers assessed each child’s behavior and evaluated how fathers interacted with them at the beginning of the study and during each of the three training stages. They also recorded each child’s autistic-like behaviors during and after play. During the first stage, fathers learned to initiate play with their children through animated repetition of their children’s vocalizations and actions. Fathers were told to resist the temptation to direct their child’s play and instead to follow the child’s lead. In the second phase, they were told to wait for their child’s response before continuing play. Eventually, the two techniques were used together.

The fathers were able to view the videotaped sessions to see their progress and areas needing improvement were discussed.

“We are really interested in promoting social balance, or turn-taking, in autistic children and their parents,” Elder said. “Normally, the parent might cue the child with one question, ask another question without waiting, and the child gets very frustrated and starts not to even attempt to respond. To combat that, we teach the parents to give a cue and wait for the response, with the expectation that the child will respond to establish that social balance.”

Fathers were more likely to initiate play in an animated way and responded more to their children during playtime. Children also became more vocal and were more than twice as likely to initiate play with their fathers. Surveys completed after the study was over also revealed that fathers viewed the training as valuable.

“One father related how after training, he felt empowered in his paternal role and became an active school liaison,” Elder said. “This proved beneficial for the child, who now had both parents consistently involved in his education.”

Researchers also were surprised to find that many fathers in the study actually took the lead in training the mothers and even siblings in the rest of the family, a key distinction from the mothers in her previous study, Elder said. In that study, researchers found similar benefits to training mothers, but moms weren’t as likely to attempt to teach fathers the techniques they learned.

Recent research has shown that early intervention with children can have a major influence on how the child develops and functions later in life.
“With the proper training at an early age, we feel that these techniques can help autistic children be more socially interactive and pick up language more easily,” Elder said.

Because of the study’s small sample size, Elder and her research team plan to continue their research with a larger group of fathers and fine-tune the interventions used based on their experiences in this study. They also plan to show fathers how to train their spouses in the techniques, and then evaluate the effectiveness of that approach. In addition, they are developing a Web site so training “booster” sessions can be broadcast via the Internet to participating fathers. Fathers will be able to view these training sessions and hear comments on how to improve upon their play sessions with their children.

“It is important for both the child’s mother and father to be involved in parent training whenever possible,” said Jaime Winter, a research scientist at the University of Washington Autism Center who previously conducted autism research at the University of California-San Diego. “Potential benefits that may follow from father participation include increased frequency of interaction and quality of interaction between fathers and their child with autism, increased treatment time for the child and support for the child’s mother.”
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/510950/

That is interesting, because my dad was qutie involved in my upbringing. Due to his line of work he had Mondays off work for example, and would take me to collect plants and mushrooms, to the library, to the woodwork cellar that was shared for all the flats around us, to the zoo etc. Definitely a lot of what I know, my dad taught me with a lot of patience. (Apart from reading, I do suspect he is either Dyslexic or has general visual processing difficulties, he is an extremely slow reader - it does not stop him from forcing himself to read a book a week though - and it was this that encouraged me greatly to learn to read myself, since I became quite impatient with his slow re-telling of the stories that I loved to listen to  :oops: )

I always figured it was because we were very alike, and because the more difficult aspects of my personality (which I think I got mainly from my Mum) were things he had learned to deal with very well over time, from having been with my Mum for about 10 years before I was born.

Its quite possible that the fathers have aspie traits and that is an additional factor in helping the children, within that study.

Its nice to hear about how you spent time with your dad Noetic. :smile:

That study is welcome and overdue. The absence of fathers, other than in a financial sense, has been one of autism's dirty little secrets for way too long.

       I was lucky. My father was very involved in my upbringing; amazing since I showed very little appreciation of his efforts. On the contrary side, Temple Grandin's father rejected her and fought to have her institutionalized even after her mother divorced him. But if anything, my mom was just as aspie as my father. Women just find it easier to blend in and be aspies.

                               Jerry Newport

Yes I have very fond memories of that time, and I learned a lot that you can't find in books etc.

The only not so fond memory is from when a girl from my class came along, when I was maybe 8 or so, and we both got covered in ticks.

My Mum found them in the evening when she was helping me in the shower (they were mostly on my back so I had not noticed them) and promptly rang the girls' Mum, who also reported her covered in the beasts.

I got fairly paranoid about ticks for a while after that and was afraid to go back into the woods  :cry:

I guess moving to the UK has had the benefit of removing the exposure to a whole lot of such parasites

I think fathers need to be more around their kids period. My father has to be gone a lot because of work, but we're still very close.

I never knew my father, and I believe that I turned out well enough. To top that off, my mother was a verbally abusive alcoholic. The effect that these environmental factors have on a person's life is largely dependent on the cognitive ability of the person in question. In the most intelligent subjects, cognitive processes seem to play the largest role in determining behavior, whereas in less intelligent subjects, environmental factors are likely to play a larger role in influencing a person's behaviors.

Blind imitation is often used by those who lack the ability and wherewithal to think for themselves. As a result, I would expect for less intelligent people to be more apt to blindly imitate the behaviors of those around them, including family members. The presence of negative environmental influences or the absence of positive environmental influences during childhood and adolescence may have a significantly negative effect on the ultimate behaviors that these people exhibit as adults.

For those with the genetic capability and predisposition toward independent thought, however, environmental influences are more incidental to a person's ultimate behavior as an adult. Would I have been better off with a nurturing family who prepared me as well as possible to meet life's challenges? Sure. Am I ruined because I grew up in a fairly negative environment? Hardly.

In fact, my behaviors are likely not much different than they would be had I been raised in an ideal environment. The main way that I would have benefited from such an environment is that I would have had an "edge" in many of life's challenges by being properly prepared for them. The way things actually turned out, I had to learn many things the hard way due to a lack of parental preparation.

I'll admit that the distinction I'm making is only applicable to the most intelligent children (perhaps the top 1% of the population or so), but it is important to recognize that in those with significant intellectual aptitude, cognitive thought tends to trump environmental influences as the ultimate driver of behavior. This distinction is worth mentioning because a disproportionately high percentage of the AS population tends to fall into the highest range of intellectual capability.

The more I know and read, makes me so glad that we made the decision for me to be the stay home parent.

My father was never really involved with me and my mother was an emotionally  abusive b****.  Sort of made it easier on what NOT to do as a father and parent!!

Peace

If fathers ave a particularly good effect on autistic kids as care-givers that should come a no surprise at all to people like myself who think the extreme male brain theory is the explanation of autism. Obviously, all things being equal, a male parentll be closer in emotional and cognitive style to an autistic child than the female parent. But I also believe it can make more of a difference whether the parent is AS or NT, and the parent's attitudte towards the child will most likely be more important than their sex.

Now, if we lived in a perfect world, full of rational people who take careful note of scientific research, there would be a great level of general concern about the disproportionate numbers of females providing educational or other kids of services to autistic children and adults. I know there is a great amount of public concern in Australia about the small numbers of males in the primary school teaching profession, and to remedy this situation the state government are doing an outrageous bit of sex discrimination by paying males scholarships to study teaching. But we don't live in a perfect world, and no one cares that autistic kids are being left in the clutches of the bimbo brigade who think eye contact is more important than maths.

I agree with Jay's point that family environment can be less important to the welfare of an intelligent autsitic person than it might be for a less intellectually independent person. I know smart people with AS or some traits who came out of schools and neighbourhoods that generally produce criminals, but they stayed clear of drugs and drink and crime, and they have relationships.

Amy, I'm glad you posted this. I showed it to my husband...he's a great dad. I think he needs to hear how important that is. Nice for him to get some affirmation

Thanks

You're welcome. :smile: