Earlier identification of autism allows for interventions to begin during toddlerhood. Literature suggests that parents are an important part of very early intervention and specific goals have indicated that they are important to progress. The use of telemedicine may increase access to interventions. The purpose of the study was to evaluate a parent-toddler training program that targeted social-communication skills and incorporated a telemedicine component. Measures included parent teaching targets, child attending, vocal requesting, and coordinated joint attention and the parent's response to coordinated joint attention. Results indicate that parent teaching increased, child attending and vocalizations increased, child coordinated joint attention increased, and the parent's response to coordinated joint attention was primarily social in nature. Analysis of the home observations indicates that direct in home observations or teleconference observations neither under or overestimated behaviors. The results are discussed in the context of teaching and feedback delivery and selection of teaching targets.

Clefts of the lip and palate are one of the most frequently occurring birth defects, affecting approximately 1 in 700 births in the United States. Early childhood special educators are often among the first professionals to provide intervention for children with cleft lip and palate. Early intervention for children with clefts often focuses on speech production skills; however, results of recent research suggest that early intervention in language skills including parent training is warranted. A model of early intervention that uses language intervention to facilitate vocabulary and speech sound development is described. This model has been successful in improving productive vocabulary use and speech sound repertoires and shows promising reduction in compensatory articulation errors. Developmentally appropriate application of the model includes provision of direct intervention to children and parent training to promote naturalistic intervention in everyday settings. Strategies for working collaboratively with speech-language pathologists and members of cleft palate and craniofacial multidisciplinary teams are also described. Finally, answers are provided to frequently occurring questions from parents about cleft palate.

This study investigated the value of participation in a Dreikurs Parent Training group and in a Combination Dreikurs and Parent Effectiveness Training group. The value of participation was measured in terms of three variables: (1) problem behaviors of the child as reported by the parents on a Checklist of Child Problem Behaviors; (2) problems of parents as reported by the parents, themselves, on a Checklist of Parent Problems; and (3) parental attitudes as measured by Hereford's Parent Attitude Survey. Parents, who volunteered to be included in parent training groups, were assigned to two treatment groups and one control group. All parents in the treatment groups were tested during the first week of group meetings and following the tenth and final group meeting. The control group was also pre and post tested but was given no training in the ten week interum period. The two checklists used were developed by the author to check for specific problem behaviors both in the child and in the parent, himself. Hereford's Parent Attitude Survey is a self-report measure of five parent attitudes: confidence, causation, acceptance, understanding and trust. Pre-and post-test data was analyzed using t-tests for matched samples to analyze the change within each group and one-way analyses of covariance to compare post-test scores were used as covariates in the analyses of covariance. Parents participating in Combination groups increased significantly toward having more trust in their child. Parents in Dreikurs groups increased significantly toward having more confidence in themselves as parents. Through analysis of results obtained on the Checklist of Child Problem Behaviors; it was discovered that parents in none of the groups changed significantly in total number of problems checked. Parents in all three groups decreased significantly in those problems originally checked on the pre-test. The two treatment groups became aware of a significant number of new problems during the treatment period. The control group did not. Parents in the Dreikurs Parent Groups checked significantly fewer total problems on the post-test administration of the Checklist of Parent Problems than they did on the pre-test. All groups decreased significantly on those problems originally checked on the pre-test. The two treatment groups became aware of a significant number of new problems not originally checked on the pre-test. The control group showed no such increase.

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No description available.

Thirty-four parents were referred by their CPS caseworkers to participate in one of two ACT for Parenting workshops. These workshops followed a 12 hour treatment protocol based on an acceptance and commitment therapy philosophy of parenting. Briefly, an ACT philosophy of parenting maintains that effective parenting requires awareness and acceptance of thoughts and feelings as they occur in the context of the parent-child relationship. An ACT philosophy of parenting also relies heavily on the identification and commitment to parenting values. Participants were asked to track acceptance and valuing behavior on a daily basis for 25 days prior to the intervention and 25 days post-intervention, as well as to complete a package of self-report instruments designed to measure both ACT specific and general psychological processes, at three different points (pre-, post- and follow-up). Nineteen parents received the treatment, and of those, seventeen provided follow-up data 3-4 months post-intervention. Results indicate statistically significant changes in the expected directions for scores on the BASC-2 Externalizing Composite as well as on the Meta-Valuing Measure. A total of 10 parents also evidenced clinically significant change in the expected directions on a variety of outcome measures.

Thesis advisor: Eric Dearing / Increasing evidence indicates that exposure to poverty in early childhood may undermine neural growth that is critical to developing executive functions (EF) and, in turn, emotional and behavioral regulation (Blair et al. 2011; Kim et al., 2013; Raver et al., 2013). There is, however, also increasing evidence indicating that high-quality Early Childhood Education (ECE) (a) buffers children from risks associated with early exposure to poverty and (b) supports healthy socio-emotional development (Bierman et al., 2008; Raver, 2002; Yoshikawa et al., 2013). One line of this intervention work has focused on two-generation programs that pair high-quality ECE with supports for parents that are designed to improve parenting and the home environment. Although evidence on two-generation programs is mixed (Grindal et al., 2016; Neville et al., 2013), it is clear that much of the risk of poverty is relayed to children through their homes, and parenting is among the most critical influences on child emotional and behavioral self-regulation in infancy and early childhood (Bradley & Corwyn, 2004; Calkins & Johnson, 1998; Calkins et al., 1998). The present study builds on existing theoretical and empirical prior work indicating that children’s EF skills are important precursors to emotional and behavioral regulation that may be best promoted when addressed in both classroom and home contexts. Specifically, the present study uses a randomized design to evaluate the effects of classroom-based activities that target children’s executive functioning and the value added by training parents to better support their children’s EFs. Children were evaluated pre- and post-intervention on EF skills and prosocial and adaptive problem-solving behavior. In general, few significant effects of either the child training or the added parent component were evident. These findings are discussed with special attention to the fact that fidelity of implementation of the classroom and parent trainings was low, with less than half of teachers incorporating games at least once a week and only 13 percent of parents attending the trainings. In addition, implications for future empirical work as well as policy and practice are discussed with special attention given to further inquiry into the malleability of EF. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology.

Parents of children with severe/moderate disabilities experience uncertainty and a lack of knowledge as their children go through the transition to adulthood. Research has shown parents play a key role in their child's postschool outcome success and that parent training and beginning transition preparation early are key predictors. This study examined the effects of parent training on parents' knowledge, expectations, and action towards their child's transition to adulthood. Participants consisted of parents of middle school youth with severe/moderate disabilities. The study measured parent knowledge, expectations, and actions. Procedures involved (a) a pretest administered to parents on their transition knowledge, (b) a training session highlighting successful examples of similar individuals with disabilities in the transition process, information on transition services, and action goals that participants can begin working on now; and (c) a posttest on parent knowledge and expectations. The mean scores on parent expectations and knowledge increased from the pretest to posttest. Additionally, parents were given an assignment to be completed after the training session as a measure of their action to assist their child towards transition. The researcher contacted participants 2 weeks following training to determine if the assignment was completed. Seventy-one percent of participants indicated they worked on their assignment during the 2-week follow-up phone call. Based on these results, parent training in this study was associated with increased parent expectations, knowledge, and actions.

Children exhibiting conduct problems comprise the largest source of referrals to children's mental health services in this county. Significant research has been conducted in an attempt to identify specific risk factors that result in increased vulnerability of a child developing conduct problems. Knowledge of these factors increases our ability to identify young children who are at greater risk for developing conduct problems. The treatment for conduct problems that possesses the greatest amount of empirical support is behavioral parent training. Yet behavioral parent training fails to address behaviors and risk factors that are present during a child's early development. Preventative behavioral parent training is a very brief primary prevention strategy designed to prevent the development of chronic and age-inappropriate display of conduct problems. This project was an initial longitudinal assessment examining the merits of preventative behavioral parent training as a primary prevention strategy for young children at-risk of developing conduct problems. Results demonstrated that prevention participants were engaging in normative rates of noncompliance and tantruming at 6-month follow-up, whereas comparison children showed a general worsening in their disruptive behaviors over time.

Despite a well-documented need for parent training in the treatment and prevention of child behavior problems, as well as the well-documented benefit of including fathers in preventative and treatment interventions, surprisingly little clinical intervention research examines the role of fathers in such trainings. This research examined the role of father involvement in behavioral parent training by examining parent-related characteristics in relation to treatment outcomes for both mothers and fathers, examining differences between mothers and fathers, and examining the additive benefit of including fathers in treatment across two studies. Both studies utilized archival data obtained from a university- and community-based parent training program for families and service providers of children displaying challenging or disruptive behavior offered through a large south eastern university medical center. The first study examined associations and relationships among parenting knowledge, parenting stress, and treatment engagement in 39 fathers and 107 mothers. The second study examined the associations and relationships among child behavior problems, treatment engagement, and therapy attitudes in 43 fathers and 98 mothers. Surprising patterns of effects were found; overall, the pattern of results of both studies across multiple levels indicated that the treatment was effective and that the pre-post changes observed were robust to a number of covariates. These findings indicate that the observed treatment efficacy was not diminished when examining specific groups of participants. It is possible that specific strengths of the program discussed in detail such as the social support and problem-solving opportunities augmented treatment benefit for subgroups of participants and mitigated the impact of group differences. While differences between mothers and fathers are often portrayed as having dramatic impacts on treatment engagement and efficacy, these group differences may not be as straightforward as is commonly depicted in the literature. Treatments that identify the nature of differential patterns of benefit and address them through treatment design may be able to deliver efficacious treatment generalizable to multiple subgroups of parents. These findings may have important implications for improving treatment engagement and treatment efficacy in the future. Based on the synthesized findings of these two studies, recommendations for treatment development, clinical practice, and future research are discussed.