Studying parents’ well-being
Professor from Marquette’s College of Nursing aims to understand how behaviors of children with autism are linked to parent health outcomes
In 2018 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a study that estimated 1 in 59 children has been identified with autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, a developmental disability defined by diagnostic criteria that include social communication and interaction deficits, and the presence of restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests or activities that can persist throughout life. While interventions for children with ASD have slowly increased in the past decade, most of them focus solely on the child, not the parents.
Dr. Norah Johnson, associate professor, Grad ’01, ’09, is interested in learning how the behaviors of children with ASD are linked to parent health outcomes because her previous research found parents are at risk of poor well-being based on their child’s challenging behaviors. Her most recent research includes two pilot interventions to improve the psychological and physical health of caregiving parents of persons with ASD. One study this past summer focused on teaching children with ASD how to swim and another brought parents together for a group exercise class.
“We saw improvements in parental well-being and perceptions of their child’s challenging behaviors in the swim study,” says Johnson, who worked on the study with Dr. Abir Bekhet, associate professor, and Dr. Mauricio Garnier-Villareal, research assistant professor.
The group exercise study, conducted by an interdisciplinary faculty and graduate student team, is still in a data-collection phase. The team has collected baseline physical and psychological health data on 36 parents and offered a group exercise class for 10 parents over nine weeks at Marquette’s Athletic and Human Performance Research Center to compare well-being between the two populations.
“After analyzing all the research, we anticipate developing a plan to submit for external funding for a family intervention for caregiving parents of children with ASD,” Johnson says.
—Sarah Koziol, Arts ’92
