Fathers as in-home trainers of autistic children

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed research will address a significant public health concern; that is, how to assist families in facilitating language development, socialization, and quality family interactions with autistic children who have complex, life-long disabilities. Results from our R29 study indicate that fathers can be trained to use two specific child training skills, imitating with animation and expectant waiting, and that fathers, in turn, can effectively train mothers to use these skills. Building on this foundational work, we propose to add other clinically supported training components and empirically evaluate intervention efficacy using the videotaping, observational, and coding methods we developed and tested during previous projects. Literature regarding fathers of children with autism remains sparse, and because mothers are the more common intervening parent, few training methods have been tested with fathers. The success of our recently conducted empirical study on training fathers, as well as important anecdotal reports from the participants on how training fathers enhanced the quality of the family interactions in general, lends support for the continued emphasis on training fathers in our current proposal and suggests wider applicability to fathers of children with a variety of behavioral disorders. Specific aims of this proposal are: (a) to evaluate the effects of the expanded father training on skill acquisition by fathers, (b) to evaluate the effects of the expanded father training on skill acquisition by mothers, (c) to evaluate the effects of the expanded in-home training on parental stress and family cohesion, and (d) to develop a Web based investigator-father feedback system and evaluate its feasibility during the training protocol and maintenance phases with a subset of five families. In addition to answering important questions related to autism, interventions and procedural methods in our proposed work may have wider applicability and prove critical in developing future research with a variety of challenging childhood disorders. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]