What is parent coaching with Empowered4Life?
This journey is a shared experience between parents, interventionists, and the child. You will be actively involved throughout the entire process, to empower and equip you with the skills to confidently become your child's primary interventionist. Our long-term aim is to reduce the need for continuous professional support, ultimately helping you achieve greater independence and financial savings.
Step 1:
Joint planning and observation
Step 2:
Learn evidence-based strategies
Step 3:
Role play with interventionist
Step 4:
Parent / caregiver try with their child while interventionist provide live feedback
Step 5:
Reflection
At Empowered4Life, our parent coaching sessions are customised to target the area of concern(s) (not limited to the concerns listed above) you face when working with your child! We adopted Rush and Sheldon's (2020) 5 steps coaching paired with Stringer's (2007) look-think-act model to enhance the learning of the parents we work with. We emphasize partnership and not purely as mentor and mentee. In the entire process, we analyze, problem solve and communicate with evidence based strategies to help you work with your child better. With a secondary intention in promoting a healthier and stronger parent-child bond!
Why parent coaching?
Parent involvement has been recognized as a vital component of a holistic approach to intervention strategies for young children diagnosed with ASD. Studies have shown the positive impacts of parent involvement which include, improving self-efficacy, engagement (Estes et al., 2014; Siller et al., 2018), and language and communication skills (Heidlage et al., 2020; Trembath et al., 2019) which effectively, in turn, reduces the stress of their caregivers.
Involving parents have also been shown to provide more lasting results and increases the child’s ability to generalize skills across environment and people. Furthermore, studies reviewed that interventions that involved parents have larger effects on children with autism compared to those that do not (Black & Therrien, 2018). With more findings on the significance of the positive impacts of parent involvement, there is a gradual shift from direct therapist-child interventions to parent-mediated interventions (Green et al., 2010) where the therapist imparts a certain skill to a parent.
Parent involvement may have its fair share of positive effects in enabling the parent to feel empowered, and for the child to be able to generalize and have a stronger parent-child relationship. Studies have also reported that intensive early intervention for autism requires a significant investment of time, energy, and resources for families. Moreover, there is no conclusive evidence that parental stress decreases in families that participate in such interventions (Estes et al., 2014).
References:
Black, M. E., & Therrien, W. J. (2018). Parent training programs for school-age children with autism: A systematic review. Remedial and Special Education, 39(4), 243–256. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741932517730645
Estes, A., Vismara, L., Mercado, C., Fitzpatrick, A., Elder, L., Greenson, J., Lord, C., Munson, J., Winter, J., Young, G., Dawson, G., & Rogers, S. (2014). The impact of parent-delivered intervention on parents of very young children with
autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 44(2), 353–365. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-013-1874-z
Green, J., Charman, T., McConachie, H., Aldred, C., Slonims, V., Howlin, P., Le Couteur, A., Leadbitter, K., Hudry, K., Byford, S., Barrett, B., Temple, K., Macdonald, W., & Pickles, A. (2010). Parent-mediated communication-focused treatment in children with autism (PACT): A randomised controlled trial. The Lancet, 375(9732), 2152–2160. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(10)60587-9
Heidlage, J. K., Cunningham, J. E., Kaiser, A. P., Trivette, C. M., Barton, E. E., Frey, J. R., & Roberts, M. Y. (2020). The effects of parent-implemented language interventions on child linguistic outcomes: A meta-analysis. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 50, 6–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2018.12.006
Rush, Da. D., & Shelden, M. L. (2020). The early childhood coaching handbook (2nd ed). Baltimore, Md. : Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.
Siller, M., Hotez, E., Swanson, M., Delavenne, A., Hutman, T., & Sigman, M. (2018). Parent coaching increases the parents’ capacity for reflection and self-evaluation: Results from a clinical trial in autism. Attachment & Human Development, 20(3), 287–308. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616734.2018.1446737
Stringer, E. T. (2007). Action research (3rd ed). Sage Publications.
Trembath, D., Westerveld, M. F., Teppala, S., Thirumanickam, A., Sulek, R., Rose, V., Tucker, M., Paynter, J., Hetzroni, O., Keen, D., & Vivanti, G. (2019). Profiles of vocalization change in children with autism receiving early intervention. Autism Research, 12(5), 830–842. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.2075