How autism takes a toll on families with older children

[caption id="attachment_10912" align="alignleft" width="297" caption="autistic child"][/caption]

 Editor - Having a child with autism can be stressful for families, but the impact can be particularly harmful to relationships even later on when the child is
grown according to new research.

Researchers looked at couples with grown children with autism and found they are more likely to divorce than comparable couples without autistic children.

The study is recently published in the August issue of the Journal of Family Psychology by researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Waisman Center.  This is the first study to actually track the marital history of parents with autism.  Researchers find parents with autistic children do not have a greater risk of divorcing when the children are young, but later on are more likely to divorce than other parents.

Despite the fact that later on some marriages of couples with grown autistic children fail, the majority of marriages in this study survived.

The study used a sampling of 391 couples with grown children with autism and compared that to another sample drawn from the National Survey of
Midlife in the United States.

What the study found was the divorce rate for parents of children with autism is similar to that of parents of children without disabilities until the
child reaches 8 years of age.  Subsequently divorce rates go down for parents of children without disabilities but remains high for parents of
children with autism.

“There seems to be a prolonged vulnerability for divorce in parents of children with autism,” says Hartley. “Typically, if couples can survive
the early child-rearing years, parenting demands decrease and there is often less strain on the marriage. However, parents of children with
autism often continue to live with and experience high parenting demands into their child’s adulthood, and thus marital strain may remain high
in these later years.”

Autism spectrum disorder or ASD,  has a gradation of symptoms but the core ones include difficulty establishing and maintaining social
relationships, delayed communication skills, and repetitive motions such as rocking back and forth and hand flapping.   These children need
frequent intervention and high levels of care and usually continue to live with parents as adults.

“There is a lifelong profile of challenging behaviors and symptoms associated with autism,” Hartley notes. “Few developmental disabilities appear to be
more taxing on parents and there is a great need for support services for families when the child is an adolescent and adult. Providing
support for couples to help them work on their marriages is an obvious step. If we can get information and support to these families, we hope
to be able to support lasting marriages.”