The original intervention, Wellness Enhancing Physical Activity for Young Children, or WE PLAY, was developed to help early childhood educators promote physical activity among typically developing students. Its foundations rest on social cognitive theory, the theory of planned behavior, and implementation science, and it is delivered online and free of charge. The program includes a self-paced training on the importance of physical activity and effective promotion strategies, along with supplemental resources such as a video library of game demonstrations, self-assessment tools, and game handouts. A previous adaptation had already refined the training to help teachers better include preschoolers with autism in active play, and a single-case design study had demonstrated a functional relationship between the online teacher training and increased moderate-to-vigorous physical activity in preschoolers with autism. What remained untested was whether the same framework could be handed to parents.

The rationale for doing so is grounded in a substantial body of evidence. Systematic reviews of ninety-six studies involving children from birth to age four have shown a dose-response relationship between physical activity and health benefits, and reviews of intervention research consistently find that programs grounded in theory, involving caregivers in key roles, and supported by experts are associated with increased child activity levels. A Cochrane systematic review of sixteen studies concluded that interventions engaging caregivers—particularly through active participation and role modeling—are more effective at promoting healthier behaviors in children than interventions targeting only the child. Meta-analytic findings have shown a moderate association between parents’ supportive behaviors and their children’s physical activity participation, and specific practices such as role modeling, encouragement, creating routines, and playing directly with children are well-established levers of change.

For children with autism, however, the picture is starkly different. Compared with typically developing peers, children with disabilities participate in fewer types of physical activities, often show delays in motor skills, and face barriers including behavioral challenges, social communication difficulties, and adults’ uncertainty about how to modify active games to include them. Existing physical activity interventions for preschoolers with autism have rarely measured physical activity as a primary outcome, have often focused instead on gross motor or stereotyped behaviors, and have typically taken place in educational settings that exclude caregivers. Parents of children with disabilities report valuing physical activity but encounter limited resources, time constraints, and safety concerns specific to their child’s needs, pointing to a need for tailored, parent-focused training.

To address this, the research team at Northeastern University followed a systematic adaptation approach, first making content revisions based on the literature and clinical expertise while retaining the core components and theoretical frameworks of the original intervention. The first author translated professional jargon into caregiver-friendly language, presented content in audio, visual, and written formats, replaced classroom-based strategies with home- and community-based applications, added anonymous discussion boards, and supplemented resources with social stories and tip sheets addressing safety and social concerns. The resulting WE PLAY for Parents program, hosted on a free online platform, consists of seven components parents can complete independently in one to two hours: an interactive asynchronous training, a video library of active games, printable activity and behavior management guides, a self-assessment tool, three anonymous discussion boards, a resource library, and a twelve-question self-assessment that helps parents reflect on their child’s activity and family routines.

Twenty parents of children with autism aged six to eight then reviewed the adapted program. The age range was deliberate: these caregivers had recently raised preschool-age children with autism and could reflect retroactively on what would have helped between ages three and five. Participants ranged from 27 to 47 years old, with mothers making up 55 percent and fathers 45 percent—a notably inclusive split in a field historically dominated by maternal perspectives. The sample was also racially and ethnically diverse, with 30 percent identifying as Black or African American, 30 percent as White, 20 percent as American Indian or Alaskan Native, 15 percent as multiple races, and 10 percent as Hispanic or Latine, recruited from eight U.S. states. Platform data showed participants spent an average of about 68 minutes reviewing the training and resources.

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Every participant rated the online training modules and associated resources—video examples, discussion boards, action plan, self-assessment, and behavior management handout—as either helpful as is or helpful with minor modifications. Parents described the program as impactful, worthwhile, and exceeding expectations, with several spontaneously reporting that they had tried specific games from the training with their children. Participants consistently reported gains in perceived knowledge, confidence, and motivation, saying the training opened their eyes to new ways of supporting their child’s growth and left them feeling more confident as parents. Video demonstrations and handouts were singled out as especially valuable for translating concepts into practice, with parents noting the videos were easy to incorporate into daily activities and that handouts could be shared with other parents without logging in.

The community-engaged process also surfaced concrete improvements. Parents asked for greater representation of children across developmental and motor ability levels, including children who are less socially motivated or who have motor challenges. They wanted longer videos with multiple examples and modifications, and clearer anticipatory guidance to reduce the intimidation some caregivers feel when introducing unfamiliar activities—one parent warned that a particular video could be very intimidating to an autism caregiver if shown before the adaptations appeared. Follow-up interviews with four participants added requests for more information on developmental motor milestones, explicit scaffolding strategies such as hand-over-hand prompting, modeling of coping strategies for children who become overwhelmed, and a concise handout highlighting the most important takeaways. The research team incorporated all feasible suggestions, adding more video examples including individual home-based activities like dancing, anticipatory content previewing video modifications, clearer timing guidance for the self-assessment, and a mnemonic-based handout—P.L.A.Y., standing for Praise; Lead and Model; Ask, Encourage, Prompt; and Your Words Describe.

The study’s authors emphasize that the community-engaged framework was central to its success. Rather than treating parents as passive recipients, the approach positioned them as collaborators and content experts, and their feedback directly shaped decisions about format, timing, and embedded supports. The collaborative process also identified barriers often overlooked in traditional designs, including caregiver intimidation, safety and emotional regulation concerns, and variability in children’s developmental profiles. The authors note limitations: participants were English-speaking, budget and ethical constraints limited new video production featuring children with autism, and the study measured acceptability rather than behavioral outcomes, so it remains unknown whether perceived gains in confidence and motivation translate into sustained changes in parent behavior or children’s activity levels. Future work includes a fully powered randomized controlled trial with objective measures. For now, the study offers a promising, freely accessible template for putting evidence-based physical activity tools directly into the hands of the people best positioned to use them: parents.

Subject of Research: Community-engaged adaptation of an online physical activity intervention for parents of young children with autism

Article Title: WE PLAY for Parents: Community-Engaged Adaptation of an Online Physical Activity Intervention for Parents of Young Children with Autism

Article References: Medeiros, H. V., Hoffman, J., Lifter, K., & Briesch, A. (2026). WE PLAY for Parents: Community-Engaged Adaptation of an Online Physical Activity Intervention for Parents of Young Children with Autism. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02354-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02354-x

Keywords: physical activity, autism, parents, preschool children, community-engaged research, intervention adaptation, active play, caregiver-mediated intervention, early childhood, online training, social cognitive theory, developmental disabilities

The study, led by Daráine Murphy with colleagues Caroline Heary and Eilis Hennessy, used semi-structured interviews with twenty-three mothers and seven fathers whose adolescents had experienced a mental health difficulty. The researchers then applied reflexive thematic analysis, a qualitative method in which researchers systematically code interview transcripts and iteratively develop themes while remaining consciously aware of how their own perspectives shape interpretation. This approach is particularly well suited to capturing the layered, subjective texture of family experiences that standardized questionnaires often flatten. The overarching metaphor that emerged from the data was striking in its consistency: for these parents, help-seeking was like navigating a labyrinth.

That labyrinth metaphor was not merely decorative. It captured a structural reality. Parents described entering the system through a single, narrow entrance—typically the family general practitioner—and then confronting a series of interdependent gatekeepers who each controlled access to the next stage. Referrals were delayed, criteria were narrowly interpreted, and waiting lists stretched across months during which the adolescent’s condition sometimes deteriorated. The authors frame this within the well-established gateway provider model, in which the first professional a family encounters profoundly shapes whether and how quickly young people reach specialist care. When that first gate is slow or uncertain, every subsequent stage inherits the delay.

Four major themes organized the parents’ accounts. The first, labeled ‘Knowledge is Power,’ concerned the decisive role of what parents knew about adolescent mental health and about the services that existed. Parents who could recognize warning signs, understand diagnostic terminology, and name the appropriate services felt equipped to advocate effectively. Those who lacked this mental health literacy described feeling lost at the very first step, unsure whether their child’s withdrawal, self-harm, or anxiety constituted a problem that services would even accept. The finding aligns with a growing body of evidence that parental mental health literacy is one of the strongest predictors of whether young people with difficulties ever reach formal care.

The second theme, ‘Gatekeepers to Services,’ documented how parents perceived the professionals and administrative structures standing between their family and treatment. General practitioners, CAMHS teams, school staff, and intake criteria all functioned as checkpoints. Parents described repeatedly having to prove the severity of their child’s distress, sometimes feeling that their adolescent needed to reach crisis point before services would engage. The third theme, evocatively titled ‘Cul-de-sacs,’ captured the dead ends of the system: referrals that went nowhere, services that declined cases as outside their remit, and pathways that looped families back to where they started. One parent’s description of the moment of realization—’it was like my world fell apart’—gives the paper its title and conveys the vertigo of discovering that the system you assumed would catch your child may instead leave you circling.

The fourth theme centered on persistence. Across interviews, parents who eventually secured help described a process that rewarded relentless follow-up: repeated phone calls, repeated appointments, repeated insistence. Help-seeking, in other words, was not a single decision but a sustained campaign that demanded time, emotional energy, and a degree of confidence that not all families possess. The researchers note that this creates an equity problem, because families with fewer resources, less flexible employment, or lower health literacy are systematically disadvantaged in a system that effectively selects for pushy, informed, and persistent advocates.

The technical significance of the study lies partly in its methodology and partly in its timing. Adolescent mental health has become a global public health priority: large-scale epidemiological work, including analyses of the Global Burden of Disease Study, indicates that roughly half of all mental disorders have their onset by the mid-teen years, and meta-analytic estimates place the peak age of onset for many conditions firmly within adolescence. Ireland’s own data, including a 2023 Mental Health Commission independent review of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, has documented serious capacity and quality problems. Against that backdrop, understanding the family-side of the help-seeking pathway is not an academic luxury; it identifies precisely where the pipeline from distress to treatment leaks.

Previous research had established that parents act as the primary gatekeepers to adolescent mental health services, and systematic reviews had catalogued barriers such as stigma, cost, and waiting times. What this study adds is a granular, process-level account of how those barriers are experienced sequentially and interactively by parents themselves. Rather than treating help-seeking as a single behavior measured at one time point, the interviews reveal it as a dynamic trajectory in which knowledge, gatekeeping, dead ends, and persistence feed into one another. A parent who hits a cul-de-sac may lose confidence; lost confidence erodes persistence; eroded persistence extends the duration of untreated illness, which is itself a known predictor of poorer outcomes across psychotic, mood, and anxiety disorders.

The authors draw practical implications from their findings at two levels. At the level of information provision, they argue for reliable, accessible, and centralized sources of guidance for parents—clear signposting about what services exist, what they treat, and how to access them—so that ‘knowledge is power’ does not remain the privilege of the already well-informed. At the level of service reform, they call for structures that reduce the burden of persistence: streamlined referral pathways, transparent acceptance criteria, and adequate capacity so that families are not forced into crisis before help arrives. They also point toward family peer support as a promising complement, consistent with emerging evidence that parents who have navigated the system can provide uniquely credible guidance to those just entering it.

The study’s limitations are acknowledged by its authors. The sample was drawn in Ireland, where the specific architecture of primary care and CAMHS shapes the labyrinth’s layout, and the predominance of mothers among participants means fathers’ experiences are less thoroughly represented, a common challenge in family mental health research. The interview data, involving sensitive disclosures about adolescents, was not made publicly available for privacy reasons. Yet the core insight travels well beyond one jurisdiction: in systems around the world, the first and most consequential navigator of a young person’s mental health journey is a worried parent, often untrained, frequently exhausted, and operating with incomplete maps. If adolescent mental health outcomes are to improve at scale, the evidence from this study suggests that supporting those navigators—with information, with responsive gatekeepers, and with pathways that do not dead-end—may be among the highest-yield interventions available.

Subject of Research: Parents' experiences of seeking professional support for an adolescent mental health difficulty

Article Title: “It was Like My World fell Apart” Parents Experiences of Seeking Support for an Adolescent Mental Health Difficulty

Article References: Murphy, D., Heary, C., & Hennessy, E. (2026). “It was Like My World fell Apart” Parents Experiences of Seeking Support for an Adolescent Mental Health Difficulty. Child Psychiatry & Human Development. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-026-02088-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10578-026-02088-2

Keywords: adolescent mental health, help-seeking, parents, qualitative research, reflexive thematic analysis, mental health services, CAMHS, gatekeepers, mental health literacy, service access, Ireland, child psychiatry

The research team, led by Başak Çağla Arslan of Lokman Hekim University in Ankara, Türkiye, together with colleagues from Hacettepe University, Lokman Hekim University, and Yüksek İhtisas University, set out to examine how coping styles and perceived social support relate to psychiatric symptoms in parents of children with DMD. Rather than treating caregiver distress as an inevitable consequence of the disease, the authors investigated the psychological machinery that shapes it: the habitual strategies people use when facing stress, and the subjective sense that others are there for them when things fall apart.

Methodologically, the study took the form of a descriptive, exploratory, cross-sectional survey distributed online. Parents completed a demographic information form along with three validated instruments: the Stress Coping Styles Scale, which distinguishes adaptive patterns such as optimistic and self-confident coping from maladaptive ones such as helpless and submissive approaches; the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, which measures perceived support separately from family, friends, and significant others; and the Brief Symptom Inventory, a screening tool capturing dimensions including anxiety, depression, somatization, hostility, and negative self-concept. In total, 139 parents participated, comprising 105 mothers and 34 fathers, with a mean age of 37.8 years and a standard deviation of 7.05. The imbalance between mothers and fathers is itself telling, reflecting the reality that caregiving burdens in many families fall disproportionately on women.

The correlational results paint a consistent picture. Optimistic coping, the tendency to approach stress with a hopeful, constructive outlook, was negatively correlated with anxiety (r = −.427), depression (r = −.370), negative self-concept (r = −.410), somatization (r = −.339), and hostility (r = −.428). In other words, parents who characteristically sought out positive ways of managing strain reported systematically fewer symptoms across the psychiatric spectrum. Helpless coping, by contrast, showed positive correlations with anxiety (r = .313), depression (r = .388), and negative self-concept (r = .327), suggesting that resignation in the face of a relentless illness goes hand in hand with internalizing distress.

Social support emerged as a second, complementary pillar. Higher perceived support from friends and significant others was associated with lower anxiety scores, while optimistic coping was itself positively associated with perceived support from family, friends, and significant others. This interconnection is not accidental, the authors suggest. Parents who face adversity with optimism may find it easier to maintain relationships, ask for help, and sustain the social networks that then buffer them against psychological deterioration. Support and coping style may thus form a mutually reinforcing loop, or alternatively a downward spiral when maladaptive coping isolates caregivers from the very people who could help them.

The most statistically rigorous evidence came from the multiple linear regression analyses. After adjusting for the contributions of other variables, optimistic coping was independently associated with lower depression scores (β = −0.368, p < .001), whereas helpless coping predicted higher depression scores (β = 0.304, p < .001). Taken together, coping styles and perceived social support explained 25.9 percent of the variance in depression scores among the parents. In behavioral science, where predicting even a tenth of the variance in mental health outcomes can be considered meaningful, a quarter of the variance explained by modifiable psychosocial factors is a substantial and clinically encouraging finding.

Why does this matter? Depression and anxiety in caregivers are not merely private suffering. Parental psychiatric symptoms can affect the quality of care a child with DMD receives, the consistency of adherence to complex treatment regimens including corticosteroids and cardiac surveillance, and the emotional environment in which the child develops. Newborn screening and molecular therapies are gradually extending the lifespan and improving the outlook for boys with DMD, which means caregiving durations are lengthening. Protecting the mental health of parents is therefore becoming an integral, rather than peripheral, component of comprehensive DMD care.

The Turkish research team is careful to frame its conclusions appropriately. Because the study is cross-sectional, it captures a single moment in time and cannot establish causation. It remains possible that psychiatric symptoms themselves push parents toward helpless coping, or that unknown third factors, such as disease severity, socioeconomic strain, or personality traits, drive both coping style and distress. The authors explicitly call for longitudinal and intervention studies to clarify the direction of these associations and to evaluate whether, for example, teaching optimistic coping skills or strengthening support networks actually reduces symptoms over time. They also note that the sample, while valuable, was recruited online and may not represent all families affected by DMD in Türkiye or elsewhere.

Even with those caveats, the practical implications are clear. Health professionals working with DMD families, including neurologists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, nurses, and psychologists, could routinely screen parents for psychiatric symptoms rather than focusing exclusively on the affected child. Screening for coping style may be equally informative: a parent leaning heavily on helpless strategies could be flagged for early psychological intervention, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, problem-solving training, or peer support programs that connect caregivers with others who understand their daily realities. The finding that support from friends and significant others, not only family, was linked to lower anxiety suggests that support interventions should look beyond the household to the wider social circle.

Ultimately, the study reframes caregiver distress in DMD not as an unavoidable toll but as a partially modifiable outcome. If optimistic coping and robust social support genuinely shield parents from depression and anxiety, then psychosocial care can move from reactive crisis management to proactive prevention. For the mothers and fathers who wake every day to muscle biopsies, wheelchair fittings, and the quiet grief of watching a progressive disease unfold, that shift could make an enormous difference, both for their own wellbeing and for the children who depend on them most.

Subject of Research: Coping styles, perceived social support, and psychiatric symptoms in parents of children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy

Article Title: Coping styles, social support, and psychiatric symptoms in parents of children with duchenne muscular dystrophy

Article References: Arslan, B. Ç., Öz, F., Tunç, A. R., Öztürk, D., Sönmez, F. M., & Karaduman, A. A. (2026). Coping styles, social support, and psychiatric symptoms in parents of children with duchenne muscular dystrophy. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05593-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05593-0

Keywords: Duchenne muscular dystrophy, coping styles, social support, psychiatric symptoms, caregivers, mental health, depression, anxiety, BMC Psychology, parents, rare disease, psychosocial support