This article reports that parents rank parent training to be the most effective intervention for parents of children with autism.

Parents of 195 children with autism rated parent training, followed by speech therapy, sensory integration, separate classroom time, and discrete trial training (applied behavior analysis or ABA) as the most effective interventions for their children. Interestingly, none of these top-5 rated interventions were significantly correlated with the parentsâ?? perceptions of outcomes in seven areas (social, emotional, cognitive, etc). That is, even though parents rated these five interventions as the most effective, when they were asked to rate the contributions of these interventions to specific areas of their childâ??s progress, there were no consistent associations between these five interventions and any of the outcome areas. A few other interventions were significantly correlated with outcomes in some of the outcome areas, but these correlations were low. The authors suggest that these low correlations could be because each child participated in several different interventions that affected the childâ??s development, so that it would have been difficult for one single intervention to be highly correlated with an outcome.