High-quality inclusive education is important for promoting the positive development of children with disabilities in early childhood care and education (ECCE) settings. However, ECCE teachers may not have the knowledge and skills to manage challenging behaviors in young children, especially those with disabilities. Infant and Early childhood mental health consultation (IECMHC) is one mechanism to support the professional development of teachers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTeacher-Child Interaction Training-Universal (TCIT-U) is effective for increasing teachers' use of strategies that promote positive child behavior; however, the exact mechanisms of change are unknown. Using a cluster randomized control trial in a sample of 410 racially- and ethnically-diverse children (M = 41.73 months; 50% White, 45% Black/African-American, 4% Multiracial, 1% Asian; 59% Hispanic; 87% with disabilities) taught by 102 teachers from 38 classrooms in eight schools, we attempted to identify these mechanisms of action.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Childcare center closures during COVID-19 impacted education for approximately 40 million children nationwide. Unfortunately, COVID-19 restrictions significantly limited the extent that outside personnel could provide in-person support to educators, resulting in the need for innovative approaches to meet childcare centers' needs. A virtual robotic telepresence approach was applied to early childhood consultation models to promote child resilience while mitigating COVID-19 risks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Picky eating commonly co-occurs with disruptive behaviors in young children. While feeding interventions exist, it remains unknown whether unmodified behavioral parent training (BPT) improves maladaptive child eating. As coercive feeding practices may exacerbate picky eating, BPT could ameliorate associated behaviors by increasing authoritative parenting.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOn 18 June 2022, Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines were authorized under an Emergency Use Authorization by the United States Food and Drug Administration to prevent severe coronavirus disease in children six months to four years of age. Despite approval of the COVID-19 vaccinations for young children, there remain ongoing challenges reaching widespread coverage due to parental decision-making. Parental decision-making plays a pivotal, yet understudied, role governing vaccine adoption among this priority demographic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTelehealth treatment for child disruptive behavior has the potential to overcome multiple barriers to access (e.g., transportation, therapist availability).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Disruptive behavior disorders are among the most prevalent pediatric mental health referrals for young children. However, families from historically minoritized social identities have experienced disparities in treatment access, retention, and outcomes. Evidence-based interventions such as Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) have been found to be effective in reducing children's disruptive behaviors in minoritized families.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGrowing evidence suggests that Teacher-Child Interaction Training-Universal (TCIT-U) is effective for increasing teachers' use of strategies that promote positive child behavior, but more rigorous research with larger, diverse samples is needed to understand the effects of TCIT-U on teacher and child outcomes in early childhood special education. Using a cluster randomized control trial, we evaluated the effects of TCIT-U on (a) teacher skill acquisition and self-efficacy and (b) child behavior and developmental functioning. Teachers in the TCIT-U group (n = 37) exhibited significantly greater increases in positive attention skills, increased consistent responding, and decreased critical statements relative to teachers in the waitlist control group (n = 36) at post and 1-month follow-up (d's range from 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Parent-child interaction therapy (PCIT) is an effective intervention to address child externalizing behaviors. However, disparities in access and retention are pervasive, which relate to the availability of PCIT in low-income communities, inadequate workforces to provide culturally appropriate care, and distrust in services due to systemic discrimination. This study incorporated natural helpers who had been trained as community health workers into PCIT delivery to improve disparities in engagement and outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The COVID-19 pandemic has had negative psychosocial impacts on young children; teachers in childcare centers continue to be overwhelmed by how to address the downstream psychological effects children are experiencing. This randomized controlled trial will study the role of a community-based, childcare center-support system in improving resilience and mitigating the long-term impacts of COVID-19 on children's development.
Methods: This study will be modeled on a successful Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation (ECMHC) intervention which utilizes mental health consultants to deliver a Jump Start+: COVID 19 Support (JS + CS) virtual toolkit to childcare centers in Miami-Dade County via a Kubi robot.
Disparities in care for low-income children of color call for innovative culturally and linguistically responsive solutions to better engage marginalized populations in evidence-based interventions. In partnership with a community organization, the addition of natural helper support as an adjunct to Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT+NH) was examined as a strategy to increase recruitment, engagement, and retention in PCIT for families historically unreached by a university-based clinic. Natural helpers provided home-based skills practice and support for forty-two families whose parents were more racially and linguistically diverse and had lower income and lower caregiver education than the typical population served by the same program (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Community-academic partnerships (CAPs) aim to improve neighborhood population health. Though measuring the impact of partnership activities at a population level can be difficult, evaluating indicators of wellbeing may increase understanding of how communities benefit from CAPs. This study examined child health indicators over time in two low-income, predominantly Black/African American and Hispanic communities where partnerships between an academic child development center and community coalitions were formed with the intention of improving child well-being.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Clin Child Adolesc Psychol
January 2022
Objective: Disparities in child mental health service engagement suggest traditional evidence-based practices do not properly consider cultural and contextual factors relevant for marginalized families. We propose a person-centered approach to improve the cultural responsiveness of services. Preliminary research supports broadening standard assessments to include a person-centered evaluation of patient cultural factors, however, controlled studies have not been conducted in the context of children's mental health care.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Measuring classroom behavior among young children is important to guide assessment and intervention decisions, yet there is limited literature on appropriate direct observation tools for this purpose. This article describes the psychometric properties of the Behavior Assessment System for Children, Student Observation System (BASC-3 SOS) with 135 children ages 20 to 67 months ( = 35 months, 64% Latinx, 78% with an established developmental disability) and their teachers ( = 36) as part of a larger randomized control trial of a teacher training intervention. Inter-rater reliability on individual BASC-3 SOS behaviors ranged from poor to good.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDisruptive behavior in young children is one of the most common referrals to behavioral health providers. While numerous effective parenting programs, such as parent-child interaction therapy (PCIT), exist for improving children's behaviors, challenges with treatment engagement and retention limit the intended positive impact on child and caregiver outcomes, particularly for racial and ethnic minority families. In an effort to address barriers contributing to poor engagement and retention in traditional PCIT service delivery and among ethnic and racial minority families, a multimedia PCIT ebook was developed and evaluated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt has been widely recognized that access to mental health treatment is imperative to address current and long-term stressors for children and parents during COVID-19. Internet-delivered Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (iPCIT, previously referred to as I-PCIT) is a strong model for remote service delivery during social distancing restrictions due to its empirical base. However, this treatment modality was not widely implemented before COVID-19, likely due to barriers to providing telehealth services.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUsing a pilot matched-pairs cluster-randomized control trial, we evaluated the acceptability and preliminary outcomes of universal Teacher-Child Interaction Training (TCIT-U) with students with disabilities in early special education programs. Twelve classrooms (clusters) were paired by age and type and then randomly assigned within pairs to either TCIT-U (81 students, 20 teachers) or wait-list control (63 students, 16 teachers) with services as usual. We analyzed the effects of TCIT-U on (a) teachers' skills acquisition via masked observational coding and (b) students' behavior and developmental functioning via teacher questionnaires.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHealth agencies call for the immediate mobilization of existing interventions in response to numerous child and family mental health concerns that have arisen as result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Answering this call, this pilot study describes the rapid, full-scale change from a primarily clinic-based Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) model to a virtual service model (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic is impacting communities worldwide, with direct effects of illness and mortality, and indirect effects on economies, workplaces, schools/daycares, and social life. However, we understand very little about the effects of this pandemic on families of young children. We used a risk and resilience model to evaluate the effects of the pandemic on mental health in diverse caregivers (N = 286) with children ages birth to 5.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFParent-Child Interaction Therapy is an empirically based, behavioral parent training program for young children exhibiting disruptive behaviors. Parent-Child Interaction Therapy shows promise for treating disruptive behaviors in children with autism spectrum disorder. Treatment processes (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe purpose of the current study was to examine whether the rate and type of parent-reported homework completion is associated with parent-report of child behavior outcomes, number of sessions to master parental skills as measured by therapist observation, and length of treatment in Parent-child Interaction Therapy (PCIT). Sixty-two parent-child dyads (primary caregiver: Mage=36.35years, female 95.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough behavioral parent training is considered efficacious treatment for childhood conduct problems, not all families benefit equally from treatment. Some parents take longer to change their behaviors and others ultimately drop out. Understanding how therapist behaviors impact parental engagement is necessary to improve treatment utilization.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective And Importance: Children with hearing loss (HL) are at increased risk of developing externalizing behavior problems (e.g., hyperactivity, attention problems).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: The current study examined the prevalence with which healthcare providers use a social media site (SMS) account (e.g., Facebook), the extent to which they use SMSs in clinical practice, and their decision-making process after accessing patient information from an SMS.
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