The transition from kindergarten to primary school has been regarded as a developmental and transformational process, marking a child’s beginning of formal schooling (Chan, 2010). For children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), changes during the transition to primary school, including increased academic demands, reduced family support, changes in classroom routines, and new peer relationships to be established, may be overwhelming, influencing their psychological adjustment to enter primary school (Fontil et al., 2019; Nuske et al., 2019). Psychosocial adjustment reflects the abilities of an individual to adapt to the new surrounding environment and handle complex, significant, or critical challenges (Madariaga et al., 2014; Lan and Sun, 2022). Several studies have shown that 10–21% of children with and without developmental disabilities have difficulties in adjusting to primary school when they enter primary school, including school refusal, anxieties, temper tantrums, and even crying (Giallo et al., 2010; Heyne et al., 2017). Particularly for children with ASD, adaptation to a different environment, including a new role, new peer group, new teacher, and new expectations during the transition to primary school, may make them susceptible to mental health problems, especially maladjustment to the new school environment and social–emotional dysfunction (Di Biasi et al., 2016; Marsh et al., 2017). Some studies report that psychological maladjustment and mental health problems occur in children with ASD in the preschool phase, ranging from 30 to 60% (Lovell and Wetherell, 2016; Sha et al., 2022). Due to maladjustment, children with ASD are unable to effectively utilize emotion regulation strategies, and they demonstrate more depression and anxiety, resulting in lower achievement in primary school.

Social support theory suggests that parental involvement serves as a salient social resource to support children in addressing learning and social communication challenges, largely determining children’s developmental outcomes (Sendra et al., 2020). Parental involvement includes a series of activities conducted by parents at home and school to enhance their children’s academic and social development (Seginer, 2006). Parental involvement has been shown to be related to improved social skills, less loneliness and anxiety, and positive peer relationships, which are necessary for children to improve psychological adaptation and successfully achieve the transition (Garbacz et al., 2018). In the transition phase, parents can foster emotional adjustment and alleviate psychological anxiety in their children through home-based guidance and education, thus improving their psychological adjustment. Considering the benefit of parental involvement on children’s transition, The Guidelines on Promoting the Scientific Transition from Kindergarten to Primary School was issued by Ministry of Education of China (2021), in which parental involvement was considered as one of the best practice strategies for achieving smooth transition (Ministry of Education of China, 2021; Hou et al., 2022). For children with ASD, parental involvement promotes their cognitive and academic development and effectively reduces their emotional and behavioral problems caused by maladjustment to the changes that occur during the transition to primary school (Dockett and Perry, 2007; Schiltz et al., 2018).

Given the lag in language development and the deficit in the social communication of children with ASD, parental involvement in transition improves their psychological adjustment to address problems and challenges in school readiness and adaption (Wang et al., 2020). However, although extant research has focused largely on parental involvement and children’s school adjustment in the transition to primary school on typically developing children in China (Chen et al., 2020; Lau, 2014; Xia et al., 2020), studies on samples of children with ASD are ignored. As resistance to change, one of the core symptoms of ASD, makes the transition to primary school even more challenging for children with ASD, it is urgent to examine how parental involvement can improve psychological adjustment in children with ASD. Furthermore, most existing studies have focused on the direct relationships between parental involvement and children’s academic development and school readiness (Chang et al., 2009; Karbach et al., 2013). Little is known about the mechanisms underlying parental involvement and psychological adjustment in children with ASD. As a parenting behavior, the frequency and quality of parental involvement may affect the psychological status of parents, such as parenting self-efficacy and parenting stress, which further affects the psychological adjustment of children with ASD during the transition to primary school. Hence, this study mainly focused on the cognitive behavioral mechanisms underlying the association between parental involvement and psychological adjustment in children with ASD during the transition from kindergarten to primary school.

Parenting self-efficacy reflects parents’ perceptions of their competence in parenting (Jones and Prinz, 2005; Gavita et al., 2014). Most researchers have reported that parents’ parenting self-efficacy largely determines their parenting behaviors and is closely linked to their children’s psychosocial adjustment and social–emotional development (Junttila et al., 2007; Trecca et al., 2022). Roskam et al. (2015) found that high parenting self-efficacy could effectively reduce children’s aggressive and disobedient behavior. Children nurtured by parents with high parenting self-efficacy directly demonstrate a high level of interpersonal communication skills and show more prosocial behaviors, such as empathy, caring for others, attention, and listening (Luengo et al., 2021). During the critical period of transition to primary school, the more confident parents are in their competence to develop children’s school readiness and school adaptation, the more likely they are to employ positive parenting strategies to address parenting challenges, and finally promote smooth and positive transition outcomes for children (Giallo et al., 2008). However, despite numerous studies on parents’ psychological well-being and positive parenting (Pastorelli et al., 2016; Li et al., 2021), no investigation has yet reported on the effect of parenting self-efficacy on psychosocial adjustment of children with ASD during the transition from kindergarten to school.

While parental involvement and self-efficacy can improve the psychological adjustment of children with ASD, this positive effect may be weakened and inhibited by the continued accumulation of parenting stress (Holloway et al., 2016; Silinskas et al., 2020). Parenting stress refers to negative psychological experiences, such as anxiety, depression, and self-reproach, associated with the fulfillment of parents’ roles (Abidin, 1995; McStay et al., 2014). Several studies have reported that parents of children with ASD suffer from more stress than parents of children without disabilities (Hutchison et al., 2016; Yamane, 2021). Furthermore, the stress of raising a child with ASD may be fundamentally different from that experienced by parents of children without disabilities (Lu et al., 2018; Stephenson et al., 2022). Parenting stress in parents of children with ASD generally leads to less sensitive and responsive parenting and more behavioral problems for their children (Lickenbrock et al., 2011). In particular, many Chinese parents worry that their children with ASD have internal emotional disorders, external behavioral problems, and lower academic development due to maladjustment to primary school, which puts parents under great stress (Wang et al., 2020). Moreover, parenting stress has also been reported to have a negative effect on social–psychological adaption in children and can positively predict their internalizing behavioral problems (Albanese et al., 2019; Kochanova et al., 2021). Some studies on families of children with ASD have suggested that maternal parenting stress predicts children’s social cognition deficiency, poor language power of expression, weak emotion regulation ability, and lack of social skills (Hayes and Watson, 2013).

In addition, according to the parenting stress model, poor interaction between parents and children can lead to higher parenting stress which also affect children’s social communication (Estes et al., 2009; Qian et al., 2022). Hence, low levels of parental involvement in transition activities may increase parental parenting stress, thus hindering children’s social adjustment (Rezendes and Scarpa, 2011). Some studies have found that maternal parenting stress serves as the mediation variable between paternal involvement and children’s social adaptability, in which high level of parental involvement can alleviate parenting stress and, in turn, reduce internalized behavioral problems of withdrawn children (Luo et al., 2020). Therefore, parenting stress could play a mediating role in the psychological adjustment of children with ASD during the transition to primary school through parental involvement.

Mowder’s (2005) parent development theory proposed that as parents interacted more with their children, their perceptions of parenting were modified by parenting behavior over time. As the transition to primary school is a crucial period for parents to develop their sense of competency and confidence—and as parents are also vulnerable to mental health problems—it is pressing to reveal the mechanism by which parental involvement influences the psychological adjustment of children with ASD through parenting psychology. However, although several studies have separately examined the role of parenting self-efficacy and parenting stress as mediators between parental involvement and children’s psychological adjustment (Semke et al., 2010; Li and Wei, 2017), few studies have included these two parenting psychological variables into a comprehensive effect model of parental involvement on children’s psychological adjustment. Previous research has suggested that higher parenting self-efficacy predicts lower levels of parenting stress and enhanced social adjustment in children with ASD (May et al., 2015; Chan et al., 2021). For example, Keen et al. (2010) found that among parents of children with ASD, interventions aimed at improving parenting self-efficacy could effectively reduce parenting stress. Other studies have also revealed that higher parenting self-efficacy is related to lower levels of stress, whereas lower efficacy predicts more stress (Bloomfield and Kendall, 2012). It could be inferred from existing studies that parenting self-efficacy and parenting stress may potentially serve as mediating functions between parental involvement and psychological adjustment. Therefore, two variables—parenting stress and parenting self-efficacy—were included in the association between parental involvement and children’s psychological adjustment in the current study.

The importance of parental involvement in the transition to primary school in children’s psychological adjustment has been highlighted in a wealth of research (Fan and Chen, 2001; Geenen et al., 2001). However, the mechanism underlying the effect of parental involvement on psychological adjustment in children with ASD remains unclear. By investigating parents of children with ASD, we aimed to explore the effect of parental involvement on psychological adjustment and the chain mediation role of parenting self-efficacy and parenting stress in the Chinese context. The chain mediation means that the independent variable affects the dependent variable through at least two mediating variables in the sequential order. The research hypotheses are as follows:

Parents can help children with ASD improve their psychological adjustment, which is irreplaceable in achieving a smooth transition from kindergarten to primary school (Besi and Sakellariou, 2019; Hou et al., 2022). This study was designed to examine the mechanisms by which parental involvement affects the psychological adjustment of children with ASD during their transition to primary school. The strength of this study is that it was done in a Chinese sample, where there has been limited research on the relationship between parental involvement, parenting self-efficacy, parenting stress, and children’s psychological adjustment, and how culture may affect some of these constructs in this sample. This study further deepens our understanding of the different pathways from parental involvement to the psychological adjustment in children with ASD, including prosocial behavior and emotional/behavioral problems, by operating in a different way in the Chinese social context.

The present study showed that parental involvement directly promoted children’s prosocial behavior, but did not directly reduce the emotional/behavioral problems that occurred during the transition to primary school, which is partially consistent with our hypothesis. The positive relationship between parental involvement and prosocial behavior in children with ASD suggests that children with ASD would demonstrate more positive behaviors such as helping others, sharing, cooperating, and being comfortable if parents were more involved in preparing their children for school. The findings provide evidence for social support theory, proposing that parental involvement functions as an essential social resource to determine positive developmental outcomes of children (Cohen and Wills, 1985; Lau and Power, 2018). Specifically, when children with ASD are preparing for or just entering primary school, the more the parents engage in language and cognitive activities at home and communicate with the teachers, the better their children’s prosocial behavior (Lau and Power, 2018). These findings support previous studies reporting that highly involved parents are more likely to nurture their children’s helping behaviors and social–emotional traits (e.g., empathy and perspective-taking; Carlo et al., 2018; Gülseven and Carlo, 2021).

In addition, the study also found that while parental involvement was marginally related to emotional/behavioral problems in children with ASD, it did not directly reduce them during the transition to a new educational setting. This is in accordance with prior research finding that maternal home-based involvement does not directly reduce the social dysfunction of children with ASD unless family cultural capital is high (Yan and Hou, 2022). Therefore, it is believed that parental involvement in parent–child activities and cognitive guidance activities in kindergarten predicts children’s positive outcomes but does not directly reduce the negative aspects of children during the transition (Powell et al., 2012; Lau and Power, 2018).

The role of parenting stress as a mediator between parental involvement and children’s psychological adjustment during the transition, including prosocial behavior and emotional/behavioral problems, was found in the current study. This supports previous studies suggesting that parental involvement can reduce parenting stress and, in turn, increase children’s prosocial behavior and decrease their emotional/behavioral problems (Blake Berryhill, 2018; Williams et al., 2020). Parenting stress has been linked to delayed social competence and increased internalizing problems in children (Anthony et al., 2005; Calkins and Perry, 2016). The parenting stress that parents experience in improving children’s school readiness and school adjustment is transferred to parental participation actions to weaken the effect of positive parenting behavior, thus hindering children’s mental health development during the transition to primary school (Bakker and Demerouti, 2013; Hou et al., 2022). Hence, the boosting effect of parental involvement as positive parenting on the psychological adjustment of children is largely dependent on the reduction of parenting stress. For example, Williams et al. (2020) found that compared with uninvolved parents, highly involved parents experienced constantly decreasing parenting stress; toddlers raised by highly involved parents exhibited increased communicative behavior and greater improvements in interactions with other adults and peers (Williams et al., 2020).

The present study provides evidence that parenting self-efficacy and parenting stress play a chain-mediating role in the relationship between parental involvement and psychological adjustment in children with ASD. This finding echoes a two-phase transformation framework on parental involvement among children with developmental disabilities proposed by Hou et al. (2022), in which as parental involvement progressed from aggressive to rational involvement, Chinese parents of children with developmental disabilities gradually improved their parenting self-efficacy through self-reflection and social support, thus decreasing their parenting stress and finally promoting their children’s transition outcome (Hou et al., 2022).

The increase in parental involvement in family education and home–school communication experience has an obvious effect on their parenting efficacy (Benson, 2015; Peng and Li, 2020). As involved parents communicate and interact more with their children in transition activities, their feelings of competence and self-efficacy are also enhanced, leading to a reduction in stress over time. However, parenting self-efficacy, as a positive emotional experience of parenting, can inhibit the adverse impact of parenting stress on the adaptive behavior of children with ASD. Parents with high self-efficacy tend to employ positive psychological strategies, such as maintaining an optimistic attitude and an appropriate toughness, to deal with stressful problems and challenging tasks (Chan et al., 2021). Several studies have also revealed a strong negative correlation between parenting self-efficacy and parenting stress, indicating that higher parenting self-efficacy is crucial for decreasing parenting stress (Hassall et al., 2005). Therefore, parenting self-efficacy and parenting stress sequentially bridge the association between parental involvement and psychological adjustment in children with ASD.

From a family perspective, the current study focused on the transition to primary school for children with ASD by examining the psychological and behavioral characteristics of the parents. In conclusion, although prior research has recognized the benefits of parental involvement in children with ASD on psychological adjustment (Chan et al., 2021), our findings provided evidence that the relationship between parental involvement and psychological adjustment in children with ASD was mediated sequentially by parenting self-efficacy and parenting stress. More importantly, we also concluded that parenting self-efficacy and parenting stress operate differently in this process. The mediation mechanism by which parental involvement affects the psychological adjustment of children with ASD goes beyond our traditional understanding, suggesting the importance of parental psychological resources and the benefits of promoting parental involvement in children’s adjustment to new formal education during the transitional period.

More importantly, this research has some potential implications for future practices aimed at improving the psychological adjustment in children with ASD. First, given the specific nature of the transition from kindergarten to primary school, parents can participate in their child’s transition activities in more ways than one, including cognitive guidance, skill and emotional support, community connection, school choice decisions, communication and consultation, and self-learning and reflection. These supports in terms of parental involvement go beyond academic support and social development support, and also include the social support that parents strive for their children with ASD. Second, with the mediation role of parenting stress and parenting self-efficacy, targeted measures including individual and family interventions, community interventions, and service-related interventions should be taken to reduce parenting stress (e.g., anxiety, depression) and increase parenting self-efficacy in parents who raise children with ASD. Some evidenced-based practices, such as Mindfulness-based interventions, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT), should be adopted to teach parents to cope with negative experiences and enhance their self-efficacy (Lee et al., 2017; Rayan and Ahmad, 2017; Lunsky et al., 2018).

Despite these advantages, several limitations of these results should not be ignored. First, the use of self-reported measures in this study may have resulted in unfaithful responses from parents of children with ASD. Despite the researchers’ assurances during data collection that their answers would remain confidential, participants might still have doubts and concerns about expressing their own high parenting stress and the low psychological adjustment of their children. Therefore, alternative data collection strategies, such as a combination of parental and teacher reports, may need to be employed in future studies to address these measurement errors. Second, fathers were recruited as much as possible, but most participants in the current study were mothers. While this guarantees information from the child’s primary caregiver, it can also lead to a gender imbalance in the sample.

The original data in the study is provided on demand. Further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by East China Normal University. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

YH was responsible for the data analysis and wrote the manuscript. TY contributed to the design of the study and data collection. JZ revised this manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This work was supported by the National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences [CHA 210263].

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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