%0 Journal Article
%T Telehealth for Expanding the Reach of Early Autism Training to Parents
%A Laurie A. Vismara
%A Gregory S. Young
%A Sally J. Rogers
%J Autism Research and Treatment
%D 2012
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2012/121878
%X Although there is consensus that parents should be involved in interventions designed for young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), parent participation alone does not ensure consistent, generalized gains in childrenĄ¯s development. Barriers such as costly intervention, time-intensive sessions, and family life may prevent parents from using the intervention at home. Telehealth integrates communication technologies to provide health-related services at a distance. A 12 one-hour per week parent intervention program was tested using telehealth delivery with nine families with ASD. The goal was to examine its feasibility and acceptance for promoting child learning throughout familiesĄ¯ daily play and caretaking interactions at home. Parents became skilled at using teachable moments to promote childrenĄ¯s spontaneous language and imitation skills and were pleased with the support and ease of telehealth learning. Preliminary results suggest the potential of technology for helping parents understand and use early intervention practices more often in their daily interactions with children. 1. Introduction Parents are their childrenĄ¯s first and most natural teacher and thus are in a unique position to influence their early years of development [1, 2]. Helping parents become proficient and long-lasting agents of change necessitates specialized training and support of their skill use throughout their daily routines. While smaller studies have noted positive behavioral gains for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) when parents are taught to implement interventions at home [3¨C6], recent randomized controlled trials involving large sample sizes have failed to demonstrate expected main effects on child outcomes from parent-delivered interventions (Carter et al., 2011; [7¨C9]). This does not appear to be due to ineffective intervention strategies, as evidenced by significant gains in childrenĄ¯s social-communicative behavior when the same intervention procedures are used by professionals [10, 11]. It also does not appear to be due to parentsĄ¯ inability to learn and demonstrate the skills in supporting childrenĄ¯s communication [2, 6, 12], play and joint attention [13], imitation [4], and shared engagement [10, 13, 14]. Instead, the lack of significant outcome differences for parent-delivered intervention may require that parents receive more instruction and practice with the content inside real-life moments and interactions with children [8]. However, working with families where the most interaction is likely to occur (i.e., their homes) may be difficult
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aurt/2012/121878/