Father–Child Interactions in Preschool Children with ASD: A Systematic Review

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.