More Than Participation: Rethinking Parent Engagement in Autism Care
Presenter: Cao Fang, PhD, MSW
Date: Friday, November 13, 2026
Time: 12–1:30 p.m. CT
Location: Online (Zoom webinar)
About the webinar
Parents of autistic children do far more than attend appointments. They coordinate services, deliver care at home, and build relationships with providers, often at significant personal cost. Yet research and practice have typically treated parent engagement as attendance, compliance, or participation, assuming that more engagement is always better. This research challenges that assumption. Drawing on a conceptual framework that positions engagement as a multidimensional coping process, and on latent class analyses of nationally representative data from the National Survey of Children’s Health, the research describes distinct behavioral and relational engagement profiles among families of autistic children and shows that these two forms of engagement relate very differently to family resilience, parent mental health, and child outcomes. Intensive behavioral engagement often signals the structural burden families absorb in fragmented service systems, whereas collaborative relational engagement acts as a resource that promotes resilience. The research concludes with implications for providers, service systems, and families, and future directions for measuring and supporting sustainable engagement.
Who should attend
Social workers, marriage and family therapists, professional counselors, psychologists, and other professionals who work with autistic children and their families. Parents, caregivers, and autistic adults are also welcome to attend!
Continuing education
Continuing education credit/contact hours are provided at no charge to participants (see details below).
1.5 hours available for:
- Social Work
- Licensed Marriage and Family Therapists
- Licensed Professional Counselors
- Psychologists
Hosted by the Autism Consortium of Texas (ACT) and ACT LEND, at the Texas Center for Disability Studies, School of Social Work, The University of Texas at Austin.
