Longitudinal Transition Between Regular and Special Education in Autistic Children: Predictors and Policy Effects.

Inclusive education policies stimulate children with special educational needs, including autism, to attend regular education. We aimed to explore change over time in school placement and transitions of autistic children since the introduction of an inclusive education policy in the Netherlands (2014) and to examine the role of individual child characteristics. This study used longitudinal data from 2013 to 2021 on autistic children (N = 1463, aged 5-16 years). We expected an increase in regular school placements and transitions to regular schools. Surprisingly, the proportion of children with autism in regular schools slightly decreased. Special school placement was more likely for boys and autistic children with lower intelligence scores, co-occurring conditions or behavioral and peer relation problems. Younger autistic children and those with lower intelligence scores more often transferred from a regular to a special school. The opposite transition was more common in older autistic children and those with higher intelligence scores. The likelihood of special-to-regular transitions did not change, but regular-to-special transitions were more prevalent during the years just after the policy change than in later years. The inclusive policy had little impact on the school placement, and at most led to a delayed drop in referrals to special schools.

Psychosocial Outcomes in Autistic Children Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Studies on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on autistic children's psychosocial outcomes have shown mixed results. In the current study we aimed to gain a better insight into the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic by comparing psychosocial outcomes collected pre-pandemic with data collected during the pandemic. We used the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) to examine change over time in psychosocial outcomes of autistic children from pre-pandemic (T0) to lockdown I (T1) and lockdown II (T2) in the Netherlands. We expected a deterioration in psychosocial outcomes. There were 224 participants in T0 and T1, of which 141 also participated in T2. The results showed a surprising improvement in psychosocial outcomes from T0 to T1. Special education and female gender were associated with increased difficulties over time, while higher age was associated with decreased difficulties. At the subdomain level we found that emotional problems remained stable, while hyperactivity, conduct problems, and peer problems decreased, and prosocial behavior increased. Attending special education predicted increased peer problems over time, while higher age predicted both decreased conduct problems and increased prosocial behavior over time. The COVID-19 pandemic may have temporarily improved the fit between the psychosocial needs and the environment for children with autism in the Netherlands.

Genetic differential susceptibility in literacy-delayed children: a randomized controlled trial on emergent literacy in kindergarten.

In this randomized controlled trial, 508 5-year-old kindergarten children participated, of whom 257 were delayed in literacy skills because they belonged to the lowest quartile of a national standard literacy test. We tested the hypothesis that some children are more susceptible to school-entry educational interventions than their peers due to their genetic makeup, and thus whether the dopamine receptor D4 gene moderated intervention effects. Children were randomly assigned to a control condition or one of two interventions involving computer programs tailored to the literacy needs of delayed pupils: Living Letters for alphabetic knowledge and Living Books for text comprehension. Effects of Living Books met the criteria of differential susceptibility. For carriers of the dopamine receptor D4 gene seven-repeat allele (about one-third of the delayed group), the Living Books program was an important addition to the common core curriculum in kindergarten (effect size d = 0.56), whereas the program did not affect the other children (d = -0.09). The same seven-repeat carriers benefited more from Living Letters than did the noncarriers, as reflected in effect sizes of 0.63 and 0.34, respectively, although such differences did not fulfill the statistical criteria for differential susceptibility. The implications of differential susceptibility for education and regarding the crucial question "what works for whom?" are discussed.

Attentional bias to activity of different parts of the body in children with functional abdominal pain: an experimental study.

OBJECTIVES: To investigate whether children with functional abdominal pain (FAP) show an attentional bias for their bodily activity, and whether receiving information about bodily activity influenced perception of bodily sensations. METHODS: A total of 30 children with FAP and 30 healthy children performed a dot-probe task, in which they were shown sham pictures about their bodily activity. RESULTS: Contrary to our hypotheses, no attentional bias for gut activity was found in either group. However, children with FAP were slower than healthy children on all supraliminal gut-activity trials, suggesting that pictures of gut activity distracted children with FAP from the task they were performing. Both groups showed an attention bias away from supraliminal pictures about heart activity. As hypothesized, more children with FAP than healthy children reported increases in pain after the experiment. CONCLUSIONS: Children with FAP seemed more strongly influenced by information about gut activity than healthy children. The present study should be replicated for intervention purposes.

Do parents maintain or exacerbate pediatric functional abdominal pain? A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Parents may maintain or exacerbate functional abdominal pain (FAP) in children through modeling of physical symptoms and solicitous responses to the child's complaints. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to examine these relationships. Parents of children with FAP reported more physical symptoms than parents of healthy children (effect size d = .36). As all studies were cross-sectional or retrospective, the causal direction was unclear. For parental responses to child complaints, not enough studies were available to perform a meta-analysis. We conclude that the present literature is unfit to establish whether parents maintain or exacerbate pediatric FAP through the processes investigated.