Objective To investigate mental health of parents of preschool children with autism spectrum disorder(ASD)so as to provide personalized guidance and support for family interven-tions.Methods Parental questionnaires were collected from 115 children with ASD(aged 18-59 months)who were hospitalized for intervention at Child Development Behavior Center of the Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University from May 2022 to February 2023,including Patient Health Questionnaire-4(PHQ-4),Parenting Stress Index-Short Form(PSI-SF),and Cop-ing Style Scale(Brief-COPE).According to the PHQ-4 total score,the parents were divided into 3 groups:normal group(Group N,n=49),mildly abnormal group(Group M,n=35),and seriously abnormal group(Group S,n=31),and the differences in parenting stress and coping styles were compared between the groups.Results 42.6％of parents had mild abnormalities and 27.0％had seriously abnormal mental health conditions,and the differences in the total parenting stress scores(P＜0.001),the total dysfunctional coping scores(P=0.004),and the negative coping strategy scores of denial(P=0.029)and self-blame(P=0.008)were statistically significant be-tween Group N,Group M.and Group S,but the difference in problem-oriented and emotion-orien-ted positive coping strategy scores was not statistically significant(P＞0.05).The results of fur-ther pairwise comparison showed that the above variables were significantly higher in Group S compared to the other two groups,indicating that parents in Group S had higher parenting pres-sure and used more negative coping strategies mainly based on denial and self-blame.Conclusion Mental health of parents of preschool children with ASD is not optimistic,and needs to be given high priority in home-based interventions for ASD preschoolers,with instruction in parental cop-ing styles(e.g.,increasing the use of positive coping strategies and decreasing the use of negative coping strategies)being a worthwhile target.
autism spectrum disorderpsychological health of parentsparenting pressurecoping stylepreschool children
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