Emotional Availability and Play in Mother–Child Dyads with ASD: Changes during a Parental Based Intervention

Abstract

(1) Background: Parental involvement during intervention with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has been demonstrated to be fundamental for children’s developmental outcomes. However, most research focused on child gains especially considering cognitive functioning and symptoms severity, whereas parental and dyadic changes during intervention need further investigation. (2) Methods: 29 mothers in interaction with their preschool children with ASD were analyzed through two standardized behavioral and observational measures to evaluate the dyadic Emotional Availability (EA) and play skills before (T1) and after (T2) a parental-based intervention. (3) Results: Results revealed mothers increased affective quality and major awareness in understanding the signals produced by the child, that in turn was more responsive, involving also using more complex play strategies. Interestingly, the role of specific factors able to predict parental characteristics was investigated, pointing out the important contribution of mothers’ perceptions of having a difficult child and child language communicative abilities. (4) Conclusions: the study enhances knowledge about child and caregiver variables that impact on dyadic outcomes, identifying important target areas to be addressed during intervention. Further, our results suggest that a parental-based intervention supports and facilitates improvements in both children’s and caregivers’ affective quality and cognitive abilities.

Emotional Availability: Clinical Populations and Clinical Applications

“…A very intensive treatment, conducted by Perzolli et al (2020), involves a therapist working with the child with ASD (mean chronological age 4 years and mean mental age 3 years) using varied modalities (e.g., speech therapy, music therapy, cognitive activities, emotional/social play for 4-6 h per week) with parents being involved in the therapy room for 2 h per week. Rather than parent-mediated intervention which has become very common in the field with children with disabilities, this program is delivered by the therapist.…”

“…Child development, specifically in the context of children with intellectual, developmental, or physical disabilities, also seems to be most influenced by parental structuring. Perhaps, future work should continue to look at the entirety of the EA Scales, which many have done since 2014, and begin to ask questions on why certain scales, such as nonhostility, seem to be unaffected by intervention or be de-creasing (i.e., increasing hostile interactions), from preto post-evaluation (Chirico et al, 2020;Perzolli et al, 2020;Salo et al, 2019).…”

Quantifying the Child–Therapist Interaction in ASD Intervention: An Observational Coding System

“…The first group refers to general constructs and usually implies a rating judgment, often based on Likert scales, to estimate the level of specific aspects of the interaction. As an example, the construct of the emotional availability (EA) has been widely studied in the context of infant–caregiver interactions [ 36 , 37 , 38 ], and operationalized in the emotional availability scales [ 39 ], a validated research tool for parenting and clinical research [ 40 , 41 , 42 ]. Differently from global coding scales, micro-coding systems focus on behavioral manifestations with fine granularity and capture behaviors at their most specific level.…”