My work in this area is grounded in academic research and informed by clinical understanding and lived experience.

I am the first author of the peer-reviewed study:

“Like something supernatural in your house”: an interpretative phenomenological analysis to explore the experiences and psychological challenges of parents raising children with autism spectrum disorder
(BMC Psychology, 2025)

This research explores how parents describe the emotional, relational, and existential impact of raising a child with autism. It highlights themes of disruption, altered identity, loss of future certainty, and the continuous effort required to maintain psychological balance in everyday life.

Rather than framing parenting through coping strategies or behavioural outcomes, the study focuses on how parents make sense of their experience, how meaning is reorganised, and where psychological strain accumulates over time.

This work informs my ongoing PhD research on the psychological sustainability of parents and families living with autism.

From this perspective, parenting a child with autism is understood as a long-term relational and ethical condition, rather than a problem to be solved.

Key areas of inquiry include:

• how parental identity is reshaped over time
• how chronic responsibility affects emotional and nervous-system regulation
• how grief, fear, guilt, anger, and exhaustion are carried without pathologising them
• how meaning, agency, and decision-making are sustained under enduring uncertainty
• how social invisibility and moral pressure impact parental wellbeing

Attention is given to the ways psychological strain accumulates gradually, often without external recognition, and to the conditions that support endurance without collapse.

This is not a clinical service, parenting programme, or intervention offer.

The work presented here is research-based and conceptual, and is concerned with understanding and articulating the lived psychological realities of parents raising children with autism.

Alongside my professional and academic work, I am the mother of an autistic teenager. This lived experience informs my sensitivity to the field, while remaining ethically distinct from the research itself.

I am open to research dialogue and collaboration with institutions, communities, and organisations in the UAE and internationally working in the areas of autism, parenting, and psychological sustainability.