Association for Behavior Analysis International

Parents play not only a pivotal role in the treatment of children who are developmentally delayed, but may also play the role of their childs best teacher when armed with strategies that are implemented under motivational and natural conditions. While treatment staff and clinical specialists may have various expertise and responsibilities on a case, their overriding job is to progressively improve the abilities of parents to be effective with their children. Irrespective of their success when directly working with the child, if they do not accomplish this transfer, they have not done their jobs. Having well-qualified treatment staff to provide quality parent education is paramount to any successful treatment program, such as when working on language and social skills; skills that parents want more than nothing else for their children who exhibit deficits in these areas. These three presentations examine the effects of parent implemented interventions in order to evoke language and social-play skills in their children with developmental disabilities. Discussions on teaching parent-implemented strategies to evoke language and social-play skills, as well as a thorough discussion on how to develop quality training programs for treatment staff that provide parent education, will be highlighted in detail.

Although children with Down's syndrome have been described as sociable and well behaved in community settings (Rosner, Hodapp, Fidler, Agun & Dykens, 2004), direct observations of their social behavior reveals low levels of reciprocal social interaction and adult prompt dependency within social contexts (Sigman & Ruskin, 1999). No studies to date have focused on teaching social initiation skills to children with Downs syndrome or parent education to evoke such interactions. In the present study, a multiple baseline design across activities shows the effective implementation of a collaborative parent education program for teaching a child with Downs syndrome to socially initiate with typical peers through the use of a portable video modeling intervention. The participants parent also demonstrated rapid acquisition of the behavioral strategies throughout treatment. Inherent in the intervention was the use of preference assessment to evoke establishing operations in the presence of teaching activities, thus contributing to more natural interactions. Potential future implications are discussed in terms of using portable video modeling interventions to target various social and functional skills and the value of a collaborative approach with parents to address social skill deficits in children with Downs syndrome.

Role-Reversal Imitation is an early developing skill that plays a pivotal role in language development and is the process by which an individual comprehends how a communicator is using some communicative act towards him, then reproduces that same communicative act back in kind within the context of a social interaction (Tomasello, 2008). An interdisciplinary approach was used in the present study to teach parents of three developmentally delayed children between the ages of 24-36 months to successfully implement a Role-Reversal Imitation protocol during play activities. The goal of implementing such a program was to teach parents to evoke a greater frequency of spontaneous verbal behavior as well as sequencing imitative actions in novel play situations initiated by their children. To demonstrate these effects, Role-Reversal Imitation was incorporated into each childs current treatment program and taught through role play, modeling, and practice with feedback. A discussion of the effects of Role-Reversal Imitation within the context of a childs treatment program as compared to treatment programs which do not explicitly target RRI will be discussed. Additionally, research on the use of Role-Reversal Imitation with non-vocal children and the use of an interdisciplinary approach to parent education will also be detailed.