Implication parentale sur la plasticité cérébrale chez l’enfant autiste.

Abstract

Our present study entitled "Parental involvement on brain plasticity in autistic children" is based on the observation that some parents encounter difficulties in monitoring their autistic child. Indeed, the link between the parent and his autistic child is often marred by difficulties due to the child's disability or the parent's journey in finding a solution for his child (Cuny, 2012). Writings on Autism and in this case on cognitive cerebral plasticity (CCP), show us that the brain of autistic people, although particular, can also be modulated through stimulation adapted by the appropriate people and acquire cognitive skills. Parents are the right people. However, faced with the announcement of the diagnosis of autism in the child, the parent-child relationship is affected, requiring an emotional family rearrangement in order to restore the affected parental functions. It is from this perspective that the problem posed by this study is that of the difficulties of the parental involvement in the stimulation of cerebral plasticity linked to the process of learning to write, read and do mathematics in autistic children. It is according to this logic that we asked ourselves the question of how does parental involvement help induce cerebral plasticity in the acquisition of cognitive knowledge in children with autism? Based on Bowlby's (1988) attachment theory revisited by Thévoz (2013), we hypothesized that parental involvement contributes to inducing cerebral plasticity in the acquisition of cognitive knowledge in the autistic child. From there, the objective is to demonstrate that it is possible to reshape the brains of autistic children to make them capable of performing certain cognitive tasks such as writing, reading and mathematics which had not been performed until then, through parental involvement. To achieve this, we made use of the clinical method. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with five parents of autistic children attending PROMHANDICAM. We used thematic content analysis to analyze the data. The results obtained were interpreted using attachment theory. These results show that the induction of PC in autistic children can be done by their parent and is a function of the quality of the attachment bond that binds them.