Parenting a child with autism while in quarantine during a deadly global pandemic adds an untold amount of stress to those families’ already stressful lives.

College of Education professor Laura Lee McIntyre was in the midst of a National Institutes of Health-funded study on families in Oregon and California with children who had autism when the pandemic struck. McIntyre found very little research on how families were coping with a pandemic while parenting a child with autism, and none that had the ethnically, racially and linguistically diverse component that her study had. She received permission from the NIH to add a component, asking families questions about how they were coping during the quarantine and the pandemic.

COVID-19 and Autism