Narrative analysis of parents' experiences with participating in the intervention of children on the autism spectrum in mainland China.

This study looked at how 16 Chinese parents experienced challenges while their autistic children received interventions. Parents faced difficult barriers that caused stress and made them question their parenting abilities. However, parents found ways to create new, more positive meanings about their role and their child's situation through thoughtful conversations and reflection. This helped them cope better, improve their relationship with their child, and refocus on what was most important in their child's treatment.

This narrative analysis explored the experiences of 16 Chinese parents whose children had received autism interventions for over two years. The study examined challenges parents faced during intervention processes and how they constructed meaning from these experiences within mainland China's sociocultural context. Parents encountered structural barriers that caused psychological distress and negatively impacted their parental identity. However, through reflexive dialogues, parents actively developed new meanings of parenthood and their children's situations.

The research highlights meaning-oriented coping as essential for mitigating negative impacts on parental identity, strengthening parent-child relationships, and readjusting intervention priorities. Findings emphasize the importance of supporting parents through facilitated meaning-making processes rather than focusing solely on intervention techniques.

Practitioners should support parents by facilitating meaning-making processes rather than focusing solely on intervention techniques. Encouraging reflexive dialogues can help parents develop coping strategies, strengthen parental identity, and improve parent-child relationships. Support should include helping parents cultivate inner strengths and self-value to better support their autistic children.

Small sample size of 16 participants limits generalizability. Study focused specifically on mainland China's sociocultural context, which may not apply to other cultural settings. Narrative analysis is subjective and findings may not be transferable to broader populations. No comparison group or quantitative measures were included.

Although the challenges encountered by parents of children on the autism spectrum during the intervention process have garnered scholarly attention, how parents subjectively review those challenges and construct meanings of their experiences remained underexamined. By applying the narrative analysis framework, we investigated the lived experiences of parents of children on the autism spectrum regarding challenges they faced in the intervention process, along with the meanings of those experiences that they constructed in the sociocultural context of mainland China. We purposively sampled 16 parents to narrate their experiences following semistructured interviews. Each participant had one child who had participated in autism intervention for more than two years.

The narrative analysis revealed that parents experienced a series of challenges imposed by structural barriers in the intervention process, which resulted in psychological distress and negative perceptions of their parental identities. Albeit susceptible to those adversities, the parents actively constructed new meanings of parenthood and their children's situations through reflexive dialogues. Our results indicate the essential role of meaning-oriented coping in helping parents with children on the autism spectrum to mitigate the negative influence of challenges on their parental identity, strengthen their parent-child relationships, and readjust their priorities for intervention.IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATIONThe role of encouraging new meanings through reflexive dialogues was found to be particularly important among parents with children on the autism spectrum to cope with the challenges they faced in the intervention process.New meanings assigned can mitigate the negative impact of challenges on parents' parental identity, strengthening their parent-child relationships, and readjusting their priorities for intervention within the Chinese socio-cultural context.It is crucial for social workers and other practitioners to support parents in mainland China by facilitating them to assign new meanings to the challenging situations.It is important for social workers and other practitioners to encourage parents to cultivate inner strengths and self-value to support their children on the autism spectrum.