Parent-child interactions influence the emotional, behavioural and cognitive development of children. There is increasing evidence that parent-child interactions and parenting practices are atypical in families with a child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but many of the findings lack consistency. This is partly due to the cross-sectional nature of the majority of studies that do not take into account bidirectional and transactional processes occuring in these families. The current panel presents four studies that used different methods to study changes in parenting behaviour and parent-child interactions in infancy, toddlerhood and middle childhood. The first presentation reports findings of a study on dyadic visual attention during parent-child interactions in high-risk (HR) and low-risk (LR) infants at 10 and 14 months. The next presentation focuses on changes in parent-child interactions between 5 and 10 months in a European cohort of HR and LR dyads. The third presentation highlights the changes in parent-child interaction in HR and LR children at five time points between 5 and 36 months. The last presentation reports on a 7-day diary study which analyzed daily parenting fluctuations in mothers of children with ASD. Together the four contributions reflect the dynamic, rather than the fixed, nature of parent-child interactions.