Predictors of Parent Responsiveness to 1-Year-Olds At-Risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder

Parent responsiveness is critical for child development of cognition, social-communication, and self-regulation. Parents tend to respond more frequently when children at-risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate stronger social-communication; however, it is unclear how responsiveness is associated with sensory characteristics of children at-risk for ASD. To address this issue, we examined the extent to which child social-communication and sensory reactivity patterns (i.e., hyper- and hypo-reactivity) predicted parent responsiveness to 1-year-olds at-risk for ASD in a community sample of 97 parent-infant pairs. A combination of child social-communication and sensory hypo-reactivity consistently predicted how parents played and talked with their 1-year-old at-risk for ASD. Parents tended to talk less and use more play actions when infants communicated less and demonstrated stronger hypo-reactivity.