Abstract

Receiving a diagnosis such as ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) regarding one's child can be traumatic for parents, and often leads to strong emotional reaction and raises questions about the future development of the child (Marvin & Pianta, 1996; Pianta et al., 1996). Resolved parents are capable to understand and accept the challenges that accompany the diagnosis and are aware of changes in their emotions over time (Marvin & Pianta, 1996). Parents who cope adaptively with their emotional reactions to the diagnosis are thought to be able to see the child's needs and therefore provide the child with appropriate support (Oppenheim et al., 2007). Supporting this hypothesis, maternal resolution has been found to be associated with sensitive responses to the child's signals (Marvin & Pianta, 1996; Oppenheim et al., 2009, 2012). One limitation of this research is that it did not include fathers. Moreover, Resolution with the diagnosis has so far been assessed dichotomously, and the possibility of assessing differing levels of resolution has not been examined.

Children with ASD show deficits in adaptive behavior including social, practical, and communications skills (Pugliese et al., 2016; Wallace et al., 2016). As far as we know, the link between parental resolution with regarding the child's ASD diagnosis and changes in adaptive behavior over time has not been studied. This is an important issue because resolved parents are expected to be sensitive to their children's signals and therefore promote gains in children's adaptive behavior.

The study adds to extant research assessments of paternal, in addition to maternal resolution, coding resolution as a continuous rather than dichotomous variable, and a longitudinal design to examine the development of adaptive behavior over time as a function of parental resolution.

77 children (ages 2-5 years) with ASD and their parents participated in the study. In the first time point resolution of the diagnosis was assessed separately for each parent using the RDI (Marvin & Pianta, 1996), and the broader autistic phenotype of the parents was assessed using The Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire (BAPQ; Hurley, et al., 2007). The adaptive behavior of the children was assessed as well and assessed again one year later using The Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (VABS; Sparrow, Balla & Cicchetti, 2005).

The main hypothesis involved associations between each parent's resolution and gains in children's adaptive behavior skills and did not receive support. However, when the resolution of both parents was considered jointly, findings showed that high resolution of both parents was linked to greater gains on adaptive behavior. These findings notwithstanding, the findings also showed that children's adaptive behavior showed considerable continuity over time. In conclusion, our study showed that beyond the stability of children's adaptive behavior the gains that were identified were associated with the combination of maternal and paternal resolution.

The findings of the current study deepen the understanding about the association

between parental resolution and children's adaptive behavior skills. The findings emphasis the holistic view of the study; only a combination of both parents' resolution was linked to greater gains on adaptive behavior. Nevertheless, high BAPQ parents were found to be less resolved. That could be explained by the BAPQ core elements. Or perhaps the RDI is not accurate enough to measure resolution for those parents. This findings emphasis the need to expand the knowledge about parental resolution and its links to child development. The practical purpose of this study is for interventions for parents of ASD children.