Preschoolers’ Uncertain Attitudes Toward Autistic Classmates Revealed in Chinese Study

Inclusive classrooms have become the default setting for many young children with autism spectrum disorder, but a new study from China suggests that the biggest obstacle to their acceptance may not be rejection at all. Instead, it may be something far quieter and far harder to measure: uncertainty. When researchers asked typically developing preschoolers how they felt about a classmate with autistic characteristics, roughly a third of the children simply answered that they did not know. That striking pattern of indecision, reported in BMC Psychology by a team at Hangzhou Normal University, offers a rare quantitative and qualitative window into how very young children navigate social difference before they have the language or experience to make sense of it.

The study, led by Dan Zhou with colleagues Mengxiao Yu, Jiayi Chen and Yujun Hu, recruited 219 typically developing children from five inclusive kindergartens in Zhejiang Province. The researchers framed their work in ecological systems theory, the idea that a child’s development unfolds within nested layers of influence, from immediate classroom interactions to broader cultural attitudes. Peer acceptance, they argue, is not a fixed trait of individual children but a product of this whole system, which means that understanding how preschoolers respond to autistic peers requires looking at what children think, what they feel, and what they are actually willing to do.

Methodologically, the team combined numbers with narratives. Each child completed a peer acceptance questionnaire built around three dimensions: cognition, or what children believe about a peer with autism; affect, or how warmly they feel toward that peer; and behavioural intention, or whether they would actually play with, help, or sit beside them. Crucially, the questionnaire used a vignette describing observable characteristics of a hypothetical child, such as differences in communication and play, without ever attaching a diagnostic label. This design choice, made in line with the study’s ethics approval, meant that children responded to behaviour they could see rather than to a category they might not understand, which is itself a revealing feature of how autism is perceived at this age.

The headline numbers are arresting. Across the three dimensions, only about 40 to 50 percent of children expressed explicit acceptance. The remainder was dominated by a response the researchers had not set out to spotlight: the option to say they did not know. These uncertainty answers ranged from 28.3 percent to 37.9 percent across questionnaire items, with nearly every item sitting at or above the 30 percent mark. In other words, for a substantial minority of preschoolers, the honest answer to questions about an autistic peer was neither yes nor no, but a shrug. For a field that has often focused on the balance between acceptance and rejection, this third category may represent a large and previously underappreciated share of young children’s social attitudes.

The pattern was not random noise. Uncertainty responses were highly consistent within individual children, suggesting a systematic response style rather than momentary confusion on a single question. A child who did not know whether they liked playing with the vignette character tended also not to know whether they would help them or sit next to them. That internal coherence implies that some children genuinely lack the cognitive scaffolding needed to form an attitude at all, whether positive or negative. In developmental terms, these children may simply not yet have the concepts, the vocabulary, or the social experience required to evaluate a peer whose behaviour differs from the norm.

Statistical analysis of the children who did express clear views added further texture. The three dimensions of acceptance were all significantly and positively correlated, with correlation coefficients ranging from .59 to .73, all significant at p less than .001. Children who understood autistic peers more positively also tended to feel warmer toward them and to intend more inclusive behaviour. But the correlations were not uniform. A Meng–Rosenthal–Rubin test comparing dependent correlations showed that the link between cognition and behavioural intention was significantly stronger than the link between cognition and affect, with a test statistic of Z = 3.37 and p less than .001. In plain terms, what preschoolers know appears to translate into what they do more directly than into what they feel, hinting that knowledge-based interventions might shift behaviour even before emotional attitudes catch up.

The qualitative half of the study, based on semi-structured interviews with 15 children and 5 teachers and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, gave that statistical skeleton a human face. The researchers distilled four themes. The first was cognitive misunderstanding and gaps: children held fragmented, sometimes inaccurate ideas about why an autistic peer might behave differently, often lacking any explanatory framework at all. The second theme concerned difficulties in interaction initiation and response, with children unsure how to start a conversation or game, or how to interpret a peer who did not respond in expected ways. The third theme captured the coexistence of affective closeness and estrangement, showing that warmth and distance could live side by side in the same child’s account of the same classmate.

The fourth theme highlighted the critical role, and the limits, of teacher support. Teachers described themselves as central brokers of inclusion, arranging seating, modelling language, and gently coaching interactions. But they also acknowledged that their scaffolding could only go so far, particularly when children’s uncertainty ran deep. One of the most practically useful findings came from the teachers themselves: they perceived structured activities as more conducive to peer engagement than free play. In unstructured time, children with autism and their typically developing classmates alike were left to navigate ambiguity on their own, and uncertainty tended to win. In structured activities, by contrast, adults could engineer shared goals, defined roles, and predictable scripts that gave uncertain children a reason and a method to engage.

Why does this matter beyond the kindergarten walls? Early childhood is when social attitudes crystallise, and uncertainty at age five may harden into avoidance at age fifteen if nobody intervenes. The authors argue that the goal of inclusive education should not only be to convert rejection into acceptance, but to convert uncertainty into active acceptance, a two-step process that begins with giving children the concepts and language they currently lack. That could mean explicit, age-appropriate explanations of autistic behaviour, picture books and stories that normalise difference, and guided peer interactions that let children accumulate positive experiences they can draw on when forming attitudes. It could also mean refining teacher scaffolding so that support is targeted at the specific dimension where a child is stuck, whether that is understanding, feeling, or acting.

The study also carries a methodological lesson for the field. By including and analysing a don’t-know option rather than treating it as missing data, the researchers surfaced a phenomenon that conventional attitude surveys often bury. Their finding that uncertainty is coherent, prevalent, and dimension-spanning suggests that future studies of peer acceptance in young children should routinely measure and report it. For China, where inclusive preschool education is expanding rapidly and where the study was supported by Zhejiang and Hangzhou social science funding programs, the practical stakes are considerable. For the wider world, the message is universal: before children can accept a peer who is different, someone has to help them make sense of the difference. Roughly one in three preschoolers in this study was waiting for exactly that help, and the classroom, with its teachers and its carefully structured moments of shared play, is where that help is most likely to arrive.

Subject of Research: Peer attitudes and uncertainty toward children with autism spectrum disorder in Chinese inclusive preschools

Article Title: Uncertainty in peer attitudes toward children with autism spectrum disorder in Chinese inclusive preschools: a mixed-methods study

Article References: Zhou, D., Yu, M., Chen, J., & Hu, Y. (2026). Uncertainty in peer attitudes toward children with autism spectrum disorder in Chinese inclusive preschools: a mixed-methods study. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05705-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05705-w

Keywords: autism spectrum disorder, peer acceptance, inclusive education, preschool children, uncertainty, ecological systems theory, mixed-methods research, social cognition, China, teacher scaffolding, child development, BMC Psychology