Abstract
Studies on parental interaction in the context of ASD has mainly focused on mothers, even if fathers and their children seem to form close and supportive relationships that may have unique effects on child development. Given the impact of ASD symptoms on a child’s ability to interact with significant others, recent findings strengthen the importance of including caregivers during treatment to guarantee a better adaptation to the child’s impairments. Despite this, fathers are scarcely involved, and interventions seem to not be tailored to their interactive characteristics and needs. For this reason, a systematic review was conducted to investigate fathers and children with ASD behaviors during interaction. This review found 12 observational studies that identified social, cognitive, and affective interactive modalities in father–child dyads through three psychology-focused journal databases: PubMed, PsycINFO and Scopus. The significant variation in both sample size and in the measures used to assess dyadic outcomes limits the ability of this work to make robust recommendations for intervention. Despite this, the results revealed characteristic behaviors of this dyad that consequently allow specific targets to be worked on during intervention. In fact, from fathers’ individual strengths and weaknesses, it is possible to implement interventions that are complementary with maternal characteristics from the perspective of personalized and optimized treatment.
Highlights
Society’s changes over the past 60 years have contributed to the reshaping of the traditional division of labor in the family, leading to fathers being more involved in parenting and childcare
Even though this paper considered a sample of 24 fathers and 26 mothers, results were discussed considering the two caregivers togethers as “parents”
From the search in PubMed, four works met the inclusion criteria established for this review
Summary
Studies on human parenting have focused more extensively on mothers, the most common primary caregivers, than on fathers, leaving fathering still under-investigated. Most research has focused on the strengths and weaknesses of maternal interactive style, as well as on the long-term benefits of mother–child relationships [3,4,5]. In recent decades, there has been great interest in understanding fathers’ quantity, quality and patterns of interaction with their children, as well as in their influence on child development [6,7,8,9,10]. The innovative studies on fathering that followed this contemporary interest highlight the importance of paternal influence on children’s development, beginning even before birth and continuing all over their life [11]
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