Autistic Traits and Mental Health Support Service Use Among Parents of Young Children with Autism
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Parents of children recently diagnosed with autism often experience elevated psychological distress, yet little is known about whether parental autistic traits are associated with support-seeking. Using baseline data from a randomized controlled trial of a parent mentoring intervention, this study examined support use among 355 parents of children aged 18 months to 8 years whose child had received an autism diagnosis within the previous 12 months. Parental autistic traits were assessed using the Ritvo Autism and Asperger Diagnostic Scale–14 (RAADS-14). Overall, 36.1% of parents reported accessing support for stress, emotional, or mental health concerns, and 33.2% scored above the RAADS-14 cutoff for elevated autistic traits. Parents with elevated autistic traits were more likely to report support use than those without elevated traits (46.6% vs. 30.8%). Elevated autistic traits were associated with greater odds of support use in both binary and continuous logistic regression models, and these associations remained significant after adjustment for demographic characteristics. However, associations were no longer statistically significant after accounting for anxiety and depressive symptoms. Anxiety symptoms emerged as the strongest independent predictor of support-seeking, whereas depressive symptoms were not significantly associated with support use. Among parents who accessed support, those with elevated autistic traits were significantly more likely to report using medical or psychiatric services. In exploratory analyses, fathers were less likely than mothers to access support overall, and anxiety symptoms appeared to be more strongly associated with support-seeking among fathers, although this finding should be interpreted cautiously. Findings suggest that elevated autistic traits are associated with differences in support use and service pathways, but that these associations are closely linked to co-occurring anxiety symptoms.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Research in Neurodiversity, 2026.
Rights
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
APA Citation
Janse van Rensburg, M. G., Hock, R., Twum, E. A., Cooper, R.-M., Reza Jameson, A. K., Conway, C. A., & Feinberg, M. E. (2026). Autistic Traits and Mental Health Support Service Use Among Parents of Young Children with Autism. Research in Neurodiversity, 100057. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rin.2026.100057