"I can do this... if you do this...": parent coaching with fathers of autistic children

Abstract

Background and aims: Early intervention (EI) from as early as 2 years has been shown to have positive long-term outcomes for autistic children and their families. The involvement of caregivers in EI is seen as critical and is in line with family-centred practice (FCP). Successful parentmediated interventions have utilised parent-coaching as an instructional approach to optimise adult learning. At present, there appears to be a lack of parent-mediated interventions which actively include fathers. This research aimed to evaluate the use of a parent-coaching intervention with fathers of autistic children to overcome this gap.

Sample: Two father-child dyads were recruited via convenience sampling. Both children were autistic and aged 4 years.

Method: Intervention goals were derived from the Social Communication Emotional Regulation Transactional Supports (SCERTS; Prizant et al., 2006) framework. Through this framework goals are framed from the child’s perspective, e.g., “I can enhance my social communication by communicating for many different reasons when my communication partners model a variety of different communication functions”. This framework inspired the title of this thesis: “I [the child] can do this, when you [the fathers in this study] do this”. A single-subject multiple baseline design (MBD) was used to evaluate the effects of a parent-coaching intervention on fathers’ implementation of target goals. Pre- and post-intervention measures of autism-specific parental self-efficacy were also employed, while qualitative feedback was obtained post-intervention.

Results: Both fathers demonstrated positive improvements in their fidelity across all 3 goals, which were maintained at follow-up. Overall, both fathers were satisfied with the intervention and reported positive improvements in their interactions with their children. In addition, both fathers reported small improvements in parental self-efficacy.

Conclusion: Overall, the findings of this study support the use of parent-coaching as an effective instructional approach with fathers of autistic children. However, future research is warranted in the area before firm conclusions can be drawn.