Resilience of Parents with a Child with Autism Spectrum Disorders and Factors for Its Potential Enhancement: Family Income and Educational Level

Autism is linked to bodily and psychological challenges for the parents who raise autistic children, it creates increased stress levels and reduced resilience because of these factors. However, many parents face the additional problem of the weakness to cope with the expenses of each therapeutic intervention, whereas often they are not adequately educated so as to be able to manage properly the information about the treatment of autism and maybe also its intake as a compulsory condition for the family environment. The writer explored the effect of family income and the parents’ educational level on the reduction of resilience through a quantitative research based on a population sample that consisted of the parents of 312 autistic children in Greece, all of them couples, namely 624 men and women, divided in equal numbers. The important impact of the annual family income on the shaping of the levels of the characteristics under study is confirmed, as the result that was drawn is that the level of financial strength is positively connected to the social support the parents receive and the resilience they develop. Likewise, the level of education is linked to social support. The social support increases when the educational level is higher, on the contrary, the opposite goes for the levels of the total stress, parental distress, parent-child dysfunctional interaction, difficulty of child, which the lower educational level increases.