The purpose of this study was to identify how autism-related child characteristics influenced mother-child interaction during a shared book reading activity. Coding systems designed to report parent and child behaviors during the task were utilized for this research. The children involved were required to meet criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), be between the ages of 4 and 7 years, be at least minimally verbal, and have an IQ greater than 55. The results of a factor analysis identified a four-factor model of a parent-directed shared literacy task--clarification techniques, feedback techniques, teaching techniques, and evocative techniques. Both parent education and child social interaction skills were found to be significant predictors of the parent's use of clarification techniques during the shared literacy task. Parent education and child IQ were both correlated with positive parenting; child IQ was negatively correlated with negative parenting. Results from chi-square analyses utilizing the dichotomized CBCL externalizing behavior problems score, demonstrated that the presence of externalizing behavior problems was significantly related to children with less positive parents. A subset of the sample of children who had elevated problem behaviors and parents exhibiting less positive parenting was identified for future research in understanding whether the child or parent is influencing the relationship between child behavior problems and parenting behaviors.

Teachers have many roles that make them influential in a child's overall development at school. The relationship formed between teachers and students early on may foreshadow adjustment and functioning of the student in later school years. A conditional latent curve model was fit to data from a subsample of the longitudinal Collaborative Family Study (n=84) and used to examine the effects of the student-teacher relationship (STR) change over time (ages 6-9) in predicting academic engagement at age 13 for both typically developing (TD) children and those with intellectual delays (ID). This model was then expanded to include the child characteristics of social skills and behavior problems in predicting STR. Results indicated that age 6 STR's predicted academic engagement at age 13; students who experienced more positive STR's very early in elementary school had higher levels of academic engagement in middle school. In addition, the child characteristics of social skills and behavior problems were predictive of the STR, and accounted for more variance within academic engagement than the STR alone. These findings emphasize the impact of the student-teacher relationship during the early school years, and underscore its importance for later formative experiences.

The purpose of the study is to identify the patterns and predictors of literacy and social skill acquisition during the transition to formal schooling in a sample of young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The current research base indicates that individuals with ASD show limited growth in social-adaptive behaviors and may experience difficulties with aspects of reading comprehension and decoding. Results indicated that children with ASD in general education had higher levels of language ability, IQ and social skills than their peers placed in special education. However, special education teachers reported receiving significantly more ASD related training and felt more confident in their ability to teach this population. In regards to academic and social outcomes, child language level and behavioral challenges proved to be the most significant predictors of success at the beginning of the school year. Despite the fact that little change occurred between child performance on outcome measures from the beginning to the end of the school year, teacher characteristics, such as ASD training and management strategies, emerged as significant predictors of child success by the end of the school year. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.

Previous research has documented tantrums and behavior problems, as well as deficits in emotion perception and labeling, among children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but there has been little research seeking to understand and connect underlying emotion processes to the frequent behavior problems within this population. Additionally, few studies have explored the ways in which parents help teach children with ASD about emotions, though these processes are frequently studied among typically-developing children.

This study assessed emotion regulation deficits among young children with ASD (N = 108; ages 4-7) and explored child and family characteristics that longitudinally predict children’s emotion regulation development. Children’s emotion regulation was assessed at two time-points, approximately 9-10 months apart, along with a detailed measure of parental emotion scaffolding at the first time-point. Part I focused on the development of the coding system to capture parental scaffolding of children’s emotion understanding during a dyadic reading task. Part II explored children’s emotion regulation abilities, and Part III assessed the ability of parent emotion scaffolding to predict change in children’s emotional, social, and behavioral functioning.

Results indicated that the emotion scaffolding coding system could be reliability coded and that maternal emotion comments predicted child emotion talk above and beyond child IQ. Children exhibited largely stable levels of emotional, behavioral, and social functioning, with these three areas closely related across development. Higher levels of parental emotion scaffolding predicted improvements across time in emotion dysregulation and behavior problems by both parent- and teacher-report, but this link may be limited to children with higher initial levels of social skills. While parental emotion scaffolding did not directly relate to child social skills, there was evidence of an indirect effect of parental emotion scaffolding whereby children who exhibited reduced emotion dysregulation in turn showed improvements in social skills. Questions about emotions, in particular, were found to contribute to reductions in emotion dysregulation. These findings support the importance of focusing on emotion regulation as an underlying deficit for children with ASD, and highlight ways in which parent-child interactions can support children’s functioning across emotional, social, and behavioral domains. Intervention implications are discussed.