Supporting Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
(ASD)

This specific training program involves the training of the parents and others to understand the complexity of the children diagnosed with ASD and how it impacts their behaviours. This program has been developed aiming to improve social behaviour, increase their ability to communicate with their parents more effectively, decrease inappropriate behaviours as well as assist the parents in improving their mental wellbeing whilst supporting their children.

The program will support the parents to make use of operant techniques. Lovass et al. (1973) demonstrated that training parents as co-therapist produced better outcomes for children with autism at follow-up than clinic treatment alone. Some specific parenting programs have also proven to have been successful in helping parents with ASD (Whittingham et al., 2009).

Our ASD parenting program is developed and designed specifically to support parents of children with ASD. This program includes psychoeducation to support parents in understanding their children and their behavioural issues. Furthermore, our parenting program also provides information for managing children and their parents’ behaviour problems, routines, special interests and anxiety. The research findings indicated that the results from parent reports showed a significant decrease in the number and intensity of problem behaviours and a significant increase in parental self-efficacy (Sofronoff & Farbotka, 2002).