Exploring Experiences of Autistic Parents: A Qualitative Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Autistic adults face unique challenges in diagnosis and parenting compared to non-autistic individuals, which are often intensified by stigma and discrimination rooted in unfounded assumptions of their parenting abilities (Pohl et al., 2020). In addition, the diagnostic process in adulthood can be emotionally and systemically challenging leading to increased stress and uncertainty (de Broize et al., 2022), while the disclosure process following diagnosis can complicate relationships and reinforce harmful misconceptions of parenting abilities (Radev et al., 2023). Biases can limit the creation of autism-specific parenting supports, increase discrimination from professionals and negatively impact parent-child relationships, highlighting the need to better understand and support autistic parents. Nine autistic parents, recruited from Canadian autism service agencies and online autistic-led communities, completed surveys and participated in a one-on-one semi-structured interview. Parents discussed their experiences with the autism diagnosis process, their perceptions of how the diagnosis impacted their parenting and their diagnosis disclosure experiences with loved ones, acquaintances and professionals. Findings revealed many parents identified as autistic through their child’s diagnostic process leading to validation, grief and increased self-understanding, in turn leading to reduced masking and better advocacy skills. Disclosure decisions were often shaped by fear of stigma and desires to protect their children, and was common with spouses, friends and children but mixed with their parents and workplaces. Positive reactions to disclosure led to relief and negativity led to distress. The findings highlighted a need for autism-specific parenting services to reduce stigma and improve outcomes for autistic parents and families.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".