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.