Parent training for Spanish-speaking families with a retarded child

✍ Scribed by Mary Prieto-Bayard; Bruce L. Baker

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1986
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 656 KB
• Volume: 14
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0090-4392
• DOI: 10.1002/1520-6629(198604)14:2<134::aid-jcop2290140204>3.0.co;2-6

✦ Synopsis

Spanish-speaking and lower socioeconomic status families have been underrepresented in studies of parent training. This study assessed utilization of and benefits from a group parent-training program for lower socioeconomic status, Spanish-speaking families with a developmentally disabled child.

Access to training was facilitated by a central location, evening meetings, reimbursement for transportation, and provision of child care. Measures, instructional manuals, and training were in Spanish. A standard group curriculum, which emphasized behavior problem management and self-help skill teaching, was modified to include incentives and weekly supervision of parents' teaching. Twenty families were assigned randomly to group training or a delayed-training control group. Measures were taken of mother's teaching ability, child's self-help skills, child's behavior problems, mother's knowledge of teaching principles, and family's home teaching. Trained parents gained significantly more than control parents on the latter three of these measures, and trained families combined gained significantly on all measures. At a 6-month follow-up, parents' home teaching had diminished, although not to pretraining levels.