Seeing the Child Within: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Reflective Functioning Intervention for Parents of Autistic Children.

This was a randomised controlled trial — people were assigned to treatments by chance, which is the most reliable way to tell whether a treatment itself caused a change.

It involved 249 people, a reasonably sized group for this kind of research.

The abstract does not include a conclusions section, so this page does not state what the researchers concluded.

This record does not state:

• the ages of the people who took part
• how long the study ran

This is a plain-language summary of one paper's abstract, not medical advice. Talk to your child's clinician before changing anything.

Journal: Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research

Year: 2026

Design: Randomized Controlled Trial

Participants: 249

Intervention: brief, scalable PRF-based programs for caregivers of autistic children

Authors: Yael Enav, Natalia Kirsman, Dana Erhard Weiss, Yael Mayer

Parents of autistic children often face elevated emotional demands and challenges in interpreting their child's inner experience. Parental reflective functioning (PRF), the capacity to understand behavior in terms of underlying mental states, is considered a key mechanism in fostering emotionally attuned and adaptive caregiving. Despite its importance, few interventions directly target PRF, and fewer still have tested brief, group-based formats designed for broad accessibility. We conducted a randomized controlled trial to evaluate a brief, virtual PRF intervention delivered via Zoom to 249 parents of autistic children. Participants were randomly assigned to either an intervention group (n = 129) or a waitlist control group (n = 130), and completed assessments at baseline and postintervention. PRF was measured using a standardized interview, while self-report questionnaires assessed parenting self-efficacy, beliefs about emotional malleability, depressive symptoms, and child adaptive functioning. Generalized estimating equations revealed significant time-by-group interactions favoring the intervention group across several outcomes. Relative to controls, intervention participants reported greater gains in reflective functioning, parenting self-efficacy, and emotional beliefs, alongside improvements in children's communication and conceptual adaptive functioning. Effects were most pronounced among parents of younger children. Within the intervention group, additional follow-up assessments indicated sustained benefits on workshop-specific outcomes. Findings support the feasibility and efficacy of brief, scalable PRF-based programs for caregivers of autistic children. To our knowledge, this is the first randomized trial to demonstrate that a short, online, parent-focused intervention can enhance reflective parenting and promote emotional and relational benefits in this population.

Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2026

PMID 42394366

DOI 10.1002/aur.70301

This record was extracted from the paper's PubMed abstract and metadata. Full-text methods and risk-of-bias details were not reviewed.