Brief Report: Compliance and Noncompliance to Parental Control Strategies in Children with High-Functioning Autism and Their Typical Peers

Abstract

The present study examined children's compliance and noncompliance behaviors in response to parental control strategies in 20 children with high-functioning autism (HFA) and 20 matched typically-developing children. Observational coding was used to measure child compliance (committed, situational), noncompliance (passive, defiance, self-assertion, negotiation) and parent control strategies (commands, reprimands, positive incentives, reasoning, bargaining) in a clean-up task. Sequential analyses were conducted to identify parent behaviors that temporally predicted child compliance or noncompliance. Children with HFA were significantly more noncompliant and less compliant immediately following parents' indirect commands than typically-developing children, even after controlling for receptive language. These results add to the existing literature on the efficacy of control strategies for children with autism, and have important implications for caregiver interventions.

Brief Report: The Development of Compliance in Toddlers at-Risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Levels of active noncompliance were relatively stable between 24 and 36 months for children in the High-Risk/ASD group while active noncompliance declined among children without ASD outcomes. This is consistent with the only known study to examine active noncompliance in children with ASD (Bryce & Jahromi, 2013), in which high-functioning preschool-age children with ASD did not differ from typically developing children. This category of noncompliance behaviors always involved verbalizations that consisted of children actively defying parental commands (e.g., “No” or “I want to keep playing”) with or without negative affect and is generally considered to be a more sophisticated form of noncompliance than passive noncompliance (Kuczynski & Kochanska, 1990).…”

“…These results suggest that intellectual and language abilities alone do not account for the differences in compliance behaviors observed in children with ASD. In contrast, Bryce and Jahromi (2013) found no significant differences in rates of compliance and noncompliance when comparing five-to six-year-old children with high-functioning ASD and typically developing children. The lack of differences seen with high-functioning children suggests that intellectual or language ability may be a factor in compliance behavior in the context of ASD.…”

“…In the current study, each compliance behavior was a mutually exclusive coding category which, consistent with previous research, was analyzed in a separate model (e.g., Bryce & Jahromi, 2013; Kochanska et al, 2001; Kuczynski & Kochanska, 1990). Given the paucity of research on the development of compliance in children at risk for developing ASD, examining the developmental trajectories of each category of compliance behavior was an important first step toward understanding the strengths and weaknesses of these children.…”

Physiological arousal and observed behaviour in parent–child interactions involving young children with Down syndrome

“…Pearson correlations were also conducted to examine the association between parent and child EDA variability and the proportions of parent communication behaviours. Consistent with previous work in parent–child interactions, proportions rather than total numbers were used because parents communicated at different frequencies, and we were interested in the quality rather than quantity of parent behaviours (Bornstein et al, ; Bryce & Jahromi, ; Peterson, Luze, Eshbaugh, Jeon, & Kantz, ; Zampini, Fasolo, & D'Odorico, ). Movement data were considered but not included in the final analyses; including movement in the models did not change the results.…”

Using video self-modeling to increase compliance to classroom requests in students with autism spectrum disorder

“…Results of several investigations suggest that young children with ASD may be less complaint to parent prohibition than mental-age matched disabled and typically developing children (Arbelle, Sigman, & Kasari, 1994). Another study (Bryce & Jahromi, 2013) found that children with high functioning ASD were significantly less compliant to their parents' indirect commands than were typically developing children even after controlling for receptive language. In addition, several studies have recently been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of school-based interventions to teach children with ASD to be more compliant to classroom requests (Ducharme & Ng, 2012).…”