Resilience among parents of children with autism spectrum disorders

Introduction: Autism falls under the most common category of the Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD). It is a lifelong neurodevelopmental disability characterized by persistent and pervasive impairments in social understanding and communication, poor adaptive functioning, and the presence of restricted or repetitive behaviors and interests. Worldwide, caregivers find caring for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) challenging. Learning how to become resilient may help family members overcome the stress and burden associated with caring for a person with ASD. Objective: To assess the pattern of resilience among the parents of children with autism spectrum disorder and to measure the association of pattern of resilience with selected background variables. Methods: A descriptive cross sectional, questionnaire-based survey was carried out among 174 parents of children with ASD in selected autism care centers of Kathmandu, Nepal. The data was collected using Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale 25 (CD-RISC-25). Both descriptive (frequency, percentage) and inferential statistics (Chi-square test) were used to analyze data in SPSS vs20. Results: The findings of the study revealed, majority of the respondents were below 35 years of age (70.1%), female (55.2%), belonged from Brahmin/Chhetri (63.2%) ethnic group, had a single child (62.1%), belonged to nuclear family (52.9%), were homemakers (34.5%), able to spend sufficiently economically (66.7%) and having a graduate or higher education (71.3%). Similarly, majority of autistic children were aged between 1 to 5 years (93.1%), and were males (71.3%). In terms of birth order, the majority of children with autism were the first-borns (72.4%), did not have any other illnesses (96.6%) and were diagnosed at the age of less than 3 years (62.1%). Overall, majority (59.7%) of the respondents had intermediate level while the remaining (40.3%) had highest level of resilience. Likewise, there was significant association ofthe level of resilience with ethnicity of respondents (p=0.015, p<0.05), occupation (p=0.007, p<0.05) of respondents, education level of respondents (p=0.000, p<0.05) and their spouses (p=0.000, p<0.05).