The Relation between NON-Adaptive Behaviors, the Need for Transactional Support for Children with ASD and the Maternal Overburden

Background: Children with ASD have different needs of transactional support such as interpersonal as well as learning support in their day-to-day family lives and their school activities. These children may be relatively independent from the initiative and responsiveness of their adult partners; from the constant availability of the partners for each initiative, and how the partners can make adjustments in speech and in behavior to be of support for the day-to-day learning situations of the child.Along parallel lines, the degree of development shown by children with ASD can involve different things in the familial context, beginning with mental and physical strain as the result of the attributions of daily life, such as high levels of stress and low quality of life for the family members.

Objectives: To verify the possible relations between the need for interpersonal support and learning and maternal overburden.

Methods: The transversal study involved 56 individuals, which were split into two groups, one group of 28 children of both genders , with ages varying between 28 to 113 months; and a second group of 28 female individuals, ranging from 30 to 50 years of age. with diverse educational backgrounds, ranging from elementary graders to college graduates. These individuals are the respective mothers of the children with ASD, who themselves work at the Brazilian Public Health-Care Service. To register the interpersonal and learning support we used the SCERTS model for assessment (Prizant, Wetherby, Rubin, and Rydell, 2006). For non-adaptive behavior we used the Autism Behavior Checklist /ABC (Krug et.al.1993); pre-validated for Brazilian Portuguese as the Inventory of Autistic Behaviors/ IAB, (Inventário de Comportamentos Autisticos/ICA); and for the assessment of maternal overburden we used the Burden Scale (in the Brazilian translation of the Burden Interview, Scazufca,2002).

Results: According to the coefficient of Spearmen, the ABC indicated a correlation with the variables of response in the Burden and in the SCERTS for Interpersonal Support.

Conclusions: We observed that the greater the index of non-adaptive behavior, greater was the children´s with ASD need for interpersonal support and their maternal overburden.