The Lived Experiences of Caregiving Parents of Children with Autism who Seek Interventions for their Child

In the last few years, there is a worldwide rapid increase in prevalence rate of parents having children who are diagnosed with autism. Within the literature, no single intervention or approach would assist all the children with autism, because of its variation in challenging characteristic from one child to another. The objective of this research was to explore an in-depth understanding of the lived experiences of six caregiving parents of children with autism who seek intervention programs for their child, how they make sense of their experiences, their challenges, and motivation using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). During the cross analysis, the following themes emerged. Process of Seeking for Intervention Program have three phases: the pre-seeking phase, actual seeking phase, and securing an intervention phase; Sense Making Process of Parents are Therapy as Integral and Therapy as Specialist-Guided; Parental Struggles in Therapy includes Time Management, Therapy Expenses, Therapy-Client Match, and Therapy Location Proximity; and the Contributing Factors to Parents’ Motivation are Parental Love, Parental Responsibilities, Therapy Progress, and Hopeful Outcomes. Parents realizes how important therapy as part of the treatment process, and how it must be continued. They are aware that whatever decisions they would hold would greatly affect their child’s progress or improvement. Finally, health care professionals in this field are encourage to enhance their knowledge, skills, and be updated with the necessary information about autism, because parents are highly dependent on them as their partners in their therapeutic journey.