The intertwined relationship between a mother and her child at elevated likelihood of autism

On a group level, children with (elevated likelihood of) autism show communicative, internalising and externalising differences in comparison to their peers. The first signs thereof can already become apparent during the first years of life. Environmental factors such as parenting are thought to influence the developmental pathways of children with and without (elevated likelihood of) autism. For instance, parental responsiveness during toddlerhood is thought to positively influence children’s communicative abilities. However, parenting can be viewed as a bidirectional process, with parents and children reciprocally influencing each other. Still, little is known about the possible influences of child characteristics on parenting behaviours in mothers and their children with (elevated likelihood of) autism.

            The current PhD-project aims to expand our knowledge on both pathways, by exploring how maternal parenting behaviours, child communicative abilities and internalizing and externalizing problems interact with each other over time. In order to disentangle these interactions during the first years of life, we will track children who are at elevated likelihood of autism, namely siblings of children with autism and preterms, as well as their parents. This PhD-project is embedded in the TIARA-study, which is a longitudinal, multidisciplinary research project investigating the developmental course of autism.

            Our first study investigates the impact of parent-reported child communicative abilities, internalising and externalising problems at age two years on an array of self-reported parenting behaviours at age three years. Thereafter, we zoom in on one particular form of parenting behaviour, namely maternal synchronicity as observed during a free play scenario. We will explore how child communicative abilities and maternal synchronicity interact with each other. Then, we will zoom out again and study how a broad array of observed parenting behaviours evolve over time, from 5 to 36 months. We will also study how these maternal behaviours are linked to previous, concurrent and subsequent child characteristics. Finally, we aim to compare parenting behaviours that are observed during free play scenarios to those observed during a task scenario. The latter has not received much attention in current literature, but could be expected to elicit a different set of parental behaviours.