Relationship between Emotional Support for Parents and Autistic Children’s Participation in Social and Physical Activities

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine if parents receiving emotional support is positively correlated with children’s participation in physical and social activities and if such a correlation exists between parental emotional support in children labeled as autistic. Data were drawn from 30,501 children aged 6 to 17 years in the 2020 National Survey of Children’s Health database and analyzed using a retrospective cross-sectional approach based on multivariate linear regression models. Results showed parental emotional support was statistically significantly correlated with children’s physical and social activity in the total sample but was not significant for the emotional support of parents with autistic children. The findings suggest that other issues must be considered as contributing factors for parents of autistic children in relation to social and physical activity participation.

Keywords:

• Autistic children
• emotional support
• participation
• national survey

Acknowledgements

The study data set and survey questionnaire are available on the DRC website at www.childhealthdata.org. The authors would like to thank other members of the research team for their efforts, including Ms. Suyeong Bae and Mr. Sanghun Nam.

Declaration of Interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this paper.

Notes

1 Because autistic individuals, advocates, and scholars assert that person-first language (e.g., individual with autism) reflects an ableist perspective and contributes to disability stigma (Bottema-Beutel et al, 2021; Gernsbacher, 2017), authors will adhere to identity-first language (e.g., autistic individual) throughout this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by the American Occupational Therapy Foundation (AOTF) Health Services Research program [Grant number AOTFHSR2019HILTON]. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the AOTF. This research was also supported by the BK21 FOUR (Fostering Outstanding Universities for Research) funded by the Ministry of Education (MOE) of the Republic of Korea and National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) (Big Data Specialized Education and Research Team for Cognitive Health and Social Integration of Community-Dwelling Older Adults). This study used a publicly available de-identified data set which was supported by the U.S. Data Resource Center for Child and Adolescent Health (DRC) and U.S. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).