Abstract:

Autism is a complicated neuro-developmental disorder of social communication that has a profound effect on children’s intellectual, social and emotional development. Children with autism need prolonged therapy, not only in specialized centers but also at home. New behaviors learned during therapy need to be implemented in other contexts too. Examples include teaching an autistic child to eat foods they don’t want, toilet training or tantrum management. For parents this whole process is quite stressful and emotionally depleting. Indeed as compared to other disabling conditions, autism creates far more family stress, especially due to the particular characteristics of the disorder. Low self-efficacy of parents in managing children with autism is particularly problematic; for example, mothers of children with autism report less parenting competence, when compared to mothers of Down’s syndrome children and children without disabilities. In several cases, parents simply do not know how to react to their children’s behavior, and feel out of control. Hence, it is obvious that treating children with autism necessarily requires the involvement of their parents too; parental education helps both the parent to cope with the situation and also the children’s progress (knowledge transfer from the therapy context). In Albania, autism has been acknowledged as a developmental disorder only after the 1990's; until then the disorder was considered as mental retardation. Even today there are very few centers working with children with autism while parents in most cases are not considered at all as part of the process. In this context many parents have no idea of how to behave with their children, and sometimes work being done during therapy is all that these children get. The aim of this paper is to present a literature review on the several education programs for parents of children with autism, to reduce their stress, and to make their children more independent and successful in their tasks. The programs are compared in terms of their effectiveness and applicability in different socio-cultural contexts. In this sense, the paper provides a reflection on the suitability of the programs in the specific Albanian context, by discussing possible barriers and limitations which might be present.

Keywords:

Autism, parents, education programs, Albania.