Living with a child with a chronic disease can affect family life in various domains.

To investigate the relationships of family systems in two different populations: parents of children with autism and parents of children with diabetes.

To examine whether there is a meaningful differentiation on family functioning between families of diabetic and of autistic children.

This cross-sectional study included 105 parents of autistic children (36 men - 69 women, mean 41 years, SD = 6,5) and 83 parents of children with diabetes (18 men - 65 women, age 41 years, SD = 7). The measuring tools used were: a) Family Environment Scale (FES). A discriminant analysis (DA) was performed. Predictor variables were age and environmental characteristics of families.

Significant mean differences were observed for all the predictors on the DA. While the log determinants were quite similar, Box's M (202, 558) indicated that the assumption of equality of covariance matrices was violated (p=.000). However, given the large sample, this problem is not regarded as serious. The DA revealed a significant association between groups and all predictors, accounting for 72, 3% of between group variability. Closer analysis of the structure matrix found only three significant predictors, namely conflict (-.507), achievement orientation (.618) and active-recreational orientation (.418). The cross validated classification showed that overall 77, 0% were correctly classified.

These findings indicate that these groups were not characterized by unique underlying factors and that may inform the development of a common family support system.