English abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is one of the neurodevelopmental disorders that have potential to impact the psychological well-being of parents. Caring for children with ASD, which is a lifelong disorder, is likely to be a challenging task. Studies among parents of children with ASD emerging from different populations have been noted to endorse greater levels of psychological burden and parenting stress compared to parents of other intellectual disabilities (ID) or typically developed (TD) children. To our knowledge, there is no study conducted to quantify the suffering of parents and their feelings towards caring for a child with ASD in Oman. Therefore, this study was conducted to examine selected variables separately which are parents' sleep problems, parenting stress, parents' burden, parents' depression and anxiety as mediators between predictor variables (children sleep and behavior problems) and the outcome variable (parents' quality of life). A case control study was conducted on a total of 507, 220 parents of children with ASD were selected. In addition, two control groups included: 109 parents of children with intellectual disabilities (ID) and 125 parents of children who were typically developed (TD). Standardized and validated questionnaires were used. Multiple linear regression analyses were performed to determine the impact of selected variables on parents' quality of life. Path analysis has been used to explore the relation between children sleep and behavior problems with parents' quality of life, as well as the extent of those associations might be mediated by parental stress, burden, sleep problems, depression, and anxiety. The model assessed the strength of a direct and indirect association between predictor variables and outcome variables. In general, all the variables were significantly higher among ASD children. In the case group, parents' stress, burden and sleep problems were found to mediate the relationship between children sleep and behavior problems with the quality of life of their parents. Moreover, it has been also found that child sleep and behavior problems were negatively related to quality of life. In addition, it has been found that children sleep and behavior problems in the ASD group attributed to parental stress, burden and sleep problems and consequently affected their quality of life. However, parent's depression and anxiety did not mediate the relationship between children sleep problems and quality of life. It is recommended that parents may need to be trained with coping strategies in order to alleviate the psychosocial burden of caring for children with ASD. Evidence based
psychosocial intervention should be provided to caregivers of children with ASD. Related to this, remedial and rehabilitation services may be available to heighten adaptive behavioral functional and reduce abnormal behavior among the ASD. This would, in turn, reduce psychosocial burden experienced among parent with ASD. The awareness about autism should be increased in the community in order to stamp out the stigma towards children with ASD and therefore the view towards people with ASD would rein in the country,
