Background Parents’ play an essential role in Parent–Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) as the primary agent of intervention with their child. Unfortunately, speech and language therapists (SLTs) report that parents’ engagement is challenging when conducting PCIT. Although focusing on and stimulating the engagement of parents, when needed, can increase the success of PCIT, little is known about what factors influence parent engagement. Aims To explore SLTs’ views about the factors that facilitate or pose barriers to parents’ engagement in PCIT. Methods & Procedures A secondary analysis of 10 interview transcripts about SLTs’ views on delivering PCIT with parents of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) was conducted. Codes from the original analysis where checked for their relevance to parents’ engagement by the first author. Potential themes were identified iteratively with all authors. Outcomes & Results Four themes were identified in the SLTs’ description of their experiences with the engagement of parents: mutual understanding, creating a constructive relationship between the SLT and parent, parental empowerment, and barriers. It became clear that SLTs were focusing on different aspects of engagement. Conclusions & Implications This study makes an initial contribution to our understanding of SLTs’ view of parents’ engagement and about what stimulates parent engagement or effects disengagement. SLTs play an important role in supporting parents to engage and stay engaged with therapy. Training SLTs on how best to engage parents, focusing on mutual understanding, creating constructive relationships between the SLT and parent, parental empowerment, and barriers, is necessary. However, more research is needed on how to train relevant skills in SLTs. Clearer definitions of engagement would improve understanding and judgements about how best to support parents.
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A common early intervention approach for preschool children with language problems is parent–child interaction therapy (PCIT). PCIT has positive effects for children with expressive language problems. It appears that speech and language therapists (SLTs) conduct this therapy in many different ways. This might be because of the variety of approaches available, the diverse set of families SLTs work with or the different organizational structures. Understanding the critical components of PCIT would enable SLTs to map the variations that are implemented and researchers to evaluate the effects of such variation. This study aimed to identify the potentially critical components of PCIT based on the practical experience of SLTs and to identify SLTs’ rationales for the way they structure PCIT. Both parameters are important for the long term goal, that is, to develop a framework that can be used to support practice. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 SLTs who had at least one year experience in delivering PCIT with preschool children with language impairment. The interviews were transcribed and analysed, using thematic analysis. Analysis of the SLT interview data identified four potentially critical components that underpin the teaching of strategies to parents: parents’ engagement, parents’ understanding, parents’ reflection and therapists’ skills. SLTs suggested that all four components are needed for the successful delivery of PCIT. The reasons that SLTs give for the way in which they structure PCIT are mainly based on organizational constraints, family needs and practicalities. SLTs consider PCIT to be valuable but challenging to implement. A framework that makes explicit these components may be beneficial to support practice.
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A key element in social development is interaction with others, and preterm infants have an increased risk for problems in this aspect. We aimed to gain additional insight into parents’ perception about their preterm child’s social interaction upon reaching school age. Parents informed us about their child being a little fighter, having issues of coping with their disabilities in social contexts, and how their child withdraws from situations that are overlystimulating. They also expressed their concerns about the future, how they encourage their child, and how they experience the transition to primary school. Parents’ experiences concerning the social interaction of their preterm child can be categorized into eight themes of processes in social interaction: child factors, self-regulation, real-time social interaction, long-term social interaction, parental factors, parenting, social environment, and social experiences. Our proposed model of social interaction in preterm infants visualizes theinterrelatedness between these themes in social interaction
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