Significance of Parent-Mediated Intervention and Its Effects on Children with Developmental Disabilities

Abstract

Background: Developmental disabilities are a group of chronic conditions that can affect a person’s physical, intellectual, or emotional development. They can manifest as delays in reaching developmental milestones, or as limitations in areas such as motor performance, vision, hearing, cognition, speech, and behaviour. CDC. (2022) So Parent-mediated intervention is a therapeutic approach that helps parents provide support and intervention to their child. In this approach, parents learn therapy techniques from professionals and then provide those therapies to their child.  Nevill et al. (2018) studies show that PMI helps to improve interactions between parents and children. Parents learn more about how to teach their children and improve their children’s language and academic skills as well as children’s motor, cognitive, communication, and social skills.  Karst, J. S., & Van Hecke, A. V. (2012) There are little studies done on parental intervention in developmental disabilities. There are many studies done in parental learning outcomes in Autism (ASD) intervention and their strategies contributing to the quality of family life and children’s social learning. Objectivity of the study is to focuses more on need of the parental mediated intervention and their outcomes in children with developmental disabilities. Hypothesis 1. There is a significant need of parent mediated intervention for children with developmental disabilities. Hypothesis 2. Parent mediated intervention has significant effect on the development disabilities of children. Method: We included total 30 parents, groups of   six children from each developmental disabilities such as Cerebral palsy, Intellectual disabilities, Autism, Learning disabilities, Attention deficit Hyperactive Disorder taken from community based disability Management Research Programme (CDMRP) University of Calicut funded by Social Justice Dept of Kerala Govt. using Convenient sample. Weekly session was given. Before the session starts a need analysis of the study was done using Semi structure interview. This was taken to know the need of the parent mediated intervention. Then parent mediated intervention was given to parents including cognitive emotion and behaviour aspects. After ten session a feedback form was taken from parents to know whether parent mediated intervention was effective for them. Paired T test was done. Result: indicates there is a significant need of parent mediated intervention and there is also has significant effect on the development disabilities of children. Conclusion: Parent mediated intervention helped parents to deal with their children in disabilities, and train their children with cognitive, emotional, behavioural aspects.