Parent Education for Parents with Cognitive Limitations

描述（由申请人提供）：与父母相关的任务可能是压倒性的。大多数家长都有大量的书面材料、媒体和网络资源来帮助他们。然而，对于有认知限制（CL）的父母来说，这些资源通常是无法获得或无法理解的。在全国范围内，为患有CL的父母提供的专门培训仍然很少，没有州或联邦政府的系统支持。专业人员在三个主要方面无法为这些家庭提供充分的支持：(1)不确定如何识别患有CL的父母，(2)对如何最好地支持患有CL的父母的知识和理解有限，以及(3)缺乏针对该群体学习需求的培训材料。如果没有适当的支持，以患有CL的父母为户主的家庭的积极父母和儿童结果是有限的，严重损害了美国每年有超过12万名患有CL的母亲所生婴儿的潜在健康发育。因此，公共卫生方面迫切需要为患有CL的父母和支持他们的专业人员提供灵活、适当和引人入胜的家长教育培训材料。在第一阶段，我们开发了一个家长培训项目“我的就寝时间”，供专业人员与患有CL的父母一起使用，对该项目进行了可行性评估，并与一个由社会服务专业人员和有风险的父母组成的小组进行了项目审查。评价的结果令人鼓舞。参与研究的家长建立了睡前习惯或改进了已有的习惯，与孩子一起睡前的压力减少了，乐趣增加了。使用“我的睡前程序”还能提高专业人员提供的支持的数量和质量。我们相信，这些第一阶段的结果证明扩大和完成该项目是合理的。我们建议在第二阶段扩大该计划，并使用延迟治疗对照组设计评估该计划，包括80对父母和支持专业人员，以评估该计划在以下方面的有效性：1)增加专业人员与患有CL的父母一起工作的知识，技能和信心，2)增加专业人员向目标父母提供的支持数量，3)改善专业人员与目标父母之间的关系质量，4)提高父母在项目主题领域的技能。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The tasks associated with parenthood can be overwhelming. Most parents have access to a wealth of written materials, media, and web-based resources to assist them. For parents who have cognitive limitations (CL), however, these resources are typically inaccessible or incomprehensible. Specialized training for parents who have CL remains scarce nationwide with no systemic support from state or federal governments. Professionals are ill-equipped to adequately support these families in three major ways: (1) uncertainty about how to identify parents who have CL, (2) limited knowledge and understanding about how to best support parents who have CL, and (3) the lack of training materials geared to the learning needs of this group. Without appropriate support, positive parent and child outcomes in families headed by parents who have CL are limited, seriously compromising the potential healthy development of over 120,000 babies are born in the United States each year to mothers with CL. Thus, there is a serious public health need for flexible, appropriate and engaging parent education training materials for parents who have CL and the professionals supporting them. In Phase I we: developed a parent training program, My Bedtime Routine, for professionals to use with parents who have CL, conducted a feasibility evaluation of the program and held a program review with a panel of social service professionals and at-risk parents. The results of the evaluation were encouraging. Parent participants established bedtime routines or improved their already-established routines, and experienced less stress and more fun with their children at bedtime. Use of My Bedtime Routine also led to improvement in the quantity and quality of professional-provided support. We believe these Phase I results justify expanding and completing the program. We propose to expand the program in Phase II and evaluate the program using a delayed, treatment-control group design with 80 pairs of parents and support professionals to assess the efficacy of the program in: 1) increasing professionals' knowledge, skills and confidence related to working with parents who have CL, 2) increasing the quantity of support offered by professionals to the targeted parents, 3) improving the quality of the relationship between professionals and targeted parents, and 4) improving parents' skills in the program topic areas.