While stress is a common experience for parents caring for a child with a developmental disability, current measures fail to distinguish between general stress in parents and the demands of parenting and perceptions of parenting skills (parenting stress). This study examined differences in 'parenting stress' reported by parents of children with autism and typically developing children. This study examined the role of child characteristics (age, autism severity, child quality of life and problem behaviour) on parenting stress in 150 parents of cognitively able children and adolescents with autism. The results revealed that child hyperactivity was the only factor significantly related to parenting stress in parents of children with autism, overruling measures of autism severity and child quality of life. This finding indicates the significant influence of problematic behaviours on parenting demands and perceptions of parenting skills in parents of children with autism, over other child characteristics conceived as within the parent's control. Study implications for future research are discussed.

Background:  The sociocommunicative problems in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are traditionally linked to impairments in Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to ascribe mental states to others. Although ToM impairments are consistently reported in young children with ASD, findings on more advanced ToM understanding in older individuals with high‐functioning ASD (HFASD) are less straightforward. Therefore, we assessed the advanced ToM abilities of a large sample of school‐aged children and adolescents with HFASD (n = 194; 6–20 years) and compared them to a typically developing (TD) comparison group (n = 60). Methods:  Participants’ advanced ToM was assessed with five social stories containing second‐order false beliefs, display rules, double bluff, faux pas, and sarcasm. Results:  Participants with HFASD performed equally well on each of the ToM stories as their TD peers. Consistent age effects were noticed with adolescents outperforming the children. Furthermore, advanced ToM was positively associated with participants’ age, verbal abilities, and general reasoning abilities. Conclusions:  Counter to what the ToM theory of ASD would predict, school‐aged children and adolescents with HFASD seem to be able to master the theoretical principles of advanced mental state reasoning. However, they may still fail to apply these theoretical principles during everyday social interactions.

Numerous studies investigated executive functioning (EF) problems in people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) using laboratory EF tasks. As laboratory task performances often differ from real life observations, the current study focused on EF in everyday life of 118 children and adolescents with ASD (6-18 years). We investigated age-related and individual differences in EF problems as reported by parents on the Behavioral Rating Inventory Executive Functions (BRIEF: Gioia et al. in Behavior rating inventory of executive function. Psychological Assessment Resources, Odesse 2000), and examined the association with autism severity. Inhibition problems were mostly found in the youngest group (6- to 8-year-olds), whereas problems with planning where more evident for 12- to 14-year-olds as compared to 9- to 11-year-olds. In a subsample of participants meeting the ADOS ASD cut-off criteria the age related differences in planning were absent, while problems with cognitive flexibility were less apparent in 15- to 18-year-olds, compared to 9- to 11-, and 12- to 14-year olds. EF problems surpassing the clinical cutoff were only observed in 20% (planning) to 51% (cognitive flexibility) of the children and adolescents, and no relation was found with ASD symptom severity. This underlines the heterogeneous nature of ASD.

This study highlights differences in cognitive strategies in children and adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorders (n = 52) on a verbal fluency task (naming as many words as possible (e.g. animals) within 60 s). The ability to form clusters of words (e.g. farm animals like "cow-horse-goat") or to switch between unrelated words (e.g. "snake" and "cat") was analyzed using a coding method that more stringently differentiates between these strategies. Results indicated that children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders switched less frequently, but produced slightly larger clusters than the comparison group, resulting in equal numbers of total words produced. The currently used measures of cognitive flexibility suggest atypical, but possibly equally efficient, fluency styles used by individuals with autism spectrum disorders.

The finding that relatives of individuals with autism show mild autistic traits is referred to as the broader autism phenotype (BAP). In the current study, 25 parents with a child with high-functioning autism and 25 parents with typically developed children were compared on: (1) the Block Design Test, (2) the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ), and (3) a reaction time task to examine reflexive covert visual orienting to social (eyes) and non-social (arrows) cues. The parent groups were scored similar on the Block Design Test and the AQ. However, fathers with an autistic child demonstrated a different reaction time pattern and responded slower on the social cues than control fathers. These results partly support and further elaborate on the BAP in parents with an autistic child.