Just six treatment sessions designed to help moms of kids with developmental disabilities manage their stress can go a long way toward reducing depression and anxiety, researchers say.

Parents of children with developmental disabilities often experience greater stress than moms and dads of typically-developing kids. Nonetheless, most interventions target the needs of their children with disabilities exclusively. Now, researchers say more attention ought to be paid to the unique needs of these parents.

In a trial of two treatment programs, Elisabeth Dykens of the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development and her colleagues found that weekly sessions with trained peer mentors could help moms conquer their stress and, in turn, interact more constructively with their children with disabilities.

For the study published online Monday in the journal Pediatrics, 243 mothers of children with developmental disabilities were randomly assigned to participate in one of two interventions.

Wendy Kozma was wrapping up her workday with a client when she got a mind-numbing phone call from her daughter: “Mom, this man is trying to take me from Wal-Mart.” Kozma feared the worst: a kidnapping. Within minutes, she would learn what was really happening. Her 25-year-old daughter, Jodi, who has the mental capacity of an 8-year-old, was being questioned for shoplifting at a Livonia, Mich. Wal-Mart. Jodi was suspected of stealing hair ties and hiding them in her waistband and purse during a shopping trip with her grandmother, records show.

The lifetime cost of caring for just one individual with autism can be as high as $2.4 million, researchers say. Expenses range from $1.4 million for individuals with autism alone to $2.4 million for those on the spectrum who also have intellectual disability, according to findings published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

Mothers of young children with autism spectrum disorders experience significantly higher levels of depressive symptoms and stress than mothers of typically developing children, a study by researchers at the University of Illinois suggests.

The study involved a nationally representative group of 100 children born in 2001 and diagnosed with ASD by age 4. The children were participants in the U.S. Department of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, which collected data on more than 14,000 children’s development at multiple times.