THE EFFECT OF LOCALIZED PLAY THERAPY WITH PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT ON STEREOTYPED BEHAVIORS OF CHILDREN WITH AUTISM

Children with autism often have difficulty with stereotyped behaviors. Play therapy helps children learn new social and behavioral skills. Therefore, this study was conducted to determine the effect of localized play therapy with parental participation on stereotyped behaviors of children with autism.

This quasi-experimental study with pre-test and post-test design with control group was conducted on 40 school-age children with autism in Urmia during 2021. Forty children with autism were recruited using convenience sampling and then randomly assigned into two groups of intervention and control. Data were collected using the Gilliam Autism Rating Scale-Second Edition (GARS-2) and a demographic questionnaire. Then parents and children in the intervention group received six 2-hour sessions of family-based play therapy using online video calls. Data were analyzed using SPSS, version 22.0.

The results showed a significant difference in the mean scores of stereotyped behaviors between the intervention and the control group after the intervention (p<.001). The results of binary comparisons based on Bonferroni correction also indicated no statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the stereotyped behavior before and after the intervention in the control group (p=1.000). However, the difference between the mean scores of the above dependent variables at three time points (before, immediately after, and three months after the intervention) was found to be statistically significant in the intervention group (p<.001).

Localized play therapy with parental involvement, as an activity with considerable adaptability, is a means of understanding and communicating with the child, positively reducing stereotyped behavior of school-age children with autism.