Predictors of Participation Difficulties in Autistic Children.

Focusing interventions with autistic children on sensory processing, emotional regulation, behavioral skills, and social skills to address their underlying neurological processing can support their increased participation in home life, friendships, classroom learning, and leisure activities. What This Article Adds: Our findings support a focus in occupational therapy interventions on sensory processing and social skills to increase activity participation in autistic children with and without ID. Emotional regulation and behavioral skills can be supported by interventions that target cognitive flexibility. Positionality Statement: This article uses the identity-first language autistic people. This nonableist language describes their strengths and abilities and is a conscious decision. This language is favored by autistic communities and self-advocates and has been adopted by health care professionals and researchers (Bottema-Beutel et al., 2021; Kenny et al., 2016).