The Challenges for Families with Autistic Children
The impact of autism on families is a much-debated topic. A recent article in the L.A. Times takes on just this subject, exploring what stages of raising an autistic child bring the highest risk for divorce.
Recent studies have found, according to the article, that the risk of divorce among families raising autistic children is significantly higher when the autistic child is young. It is then that stress rates for parents are at their highest, and when emotions can become raw, making it hard to cultivate a successful marriage.
The good news, however, is that autistic children move into their teen years, the stress on parents lets up somewhat, and the risk of divorce goes down.
Children with an autism spectrum disorder require a lot of attention, from the time that they are young even into their teenage and young adult years. Children with such disorders can be susceptible to communication problems, and to repetitive behaviors that, when combined with other difficulties, can exacerbate parental stress.
There also seems to be a perception problem he LA Times reports that some parents have been warned that the divorce rate for parents of autistic children is as high as 80 percent.
Another recent study, however, featured results that tempered these extreme perceptions of divorce in families dealing with autism. The Adolescents and Adults with Autism study looked at 391 families with autistic children, and compared them with similar families in age, sex, birth order, etc., in which children developed “normally.”
The results of that study went against the extremely high rumored divorce figures, but it did also reveal the instances when autism in families could lead to an increased risk of divorce in parent couples managing their children.
The study revealed that for couples raising a child with an ASD, the divorce rate was 23.5 percent, which is almost twice as high as the control families and their 14 percent divorce rate. When families had siblings older than the child with ASD, the rate was even higher. Also, the younger a mother was when the autistic child was born, the higher the rate of divorce, which was not the case with mothers in the control group.
For families dealing with autism, the risk of divorce continued even as their autistic child reached 30 years old. The stresses of raising an autistic child, in other words, is an even longer term stressor than a child without an ASD. In these non-ASD families, the divorce risk began to go down after children turned 8.
Assumptions about the heightened divorce risk with autistic children may have been confirmed, but other assumptions were disproved. Divorce is not more common, for example, in families with more than one child with an ASD. This is true also for families in which a child with ASK symptoms began earlier or were more severe.
The study was done by researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Georgia State University and Boston University. These researchers concluded that there was also reason for hope for families impacted by autism. More than 75 percent of these marriages remain intact, against the image often presented by the media.
