Innovations in Parent-Implemented Interventions in EI/ECSE

The concept of family-centered practices gained traction in the 1980s to present a particular approach for incorporating family strengths and needs into the services for young children with disabilities and their families (Dunst & Trivette, 1988). Family-centered practices have a direct impact on young children’s behavioral, social, and academic development and are central to EI/ECSE services and intervention approaches (Dunst & Espe-Sherwindt, 2016). Supporting families in implementing evidence-based practices have become even more critical due to the recent experiences of COVID-19 pandemic in which children with disabilities were receiving services remotely. During this time, educators and service providers depended on families to ensure strategies were implemented to address the developmental and learning needs of their children. The critical role families played in implementing interventions, coupled with efforts of the field of EI/ECSE for promoting the importance of family-centered practices, call for the continued need of rigorous research on this topic. Unfortunately, research on parent-implemented interventions often lack strong methodological rigor and diverse populations and often fail to consider contextual factors and family experiences in its intervention development (Fettig & Barton, 2014; Hong et al., 2016). This impedes our understanding of evidence-based and recommended practices. In this topical issue we included five articles that highlight and address these gaps in the research. In the first article, “A Systematic Review of Parent– Child Shared Book Reading Interventions for Infants and Toddlers,” Lorio and colleagues described a systematic review in which they identified 12 studies where researchers examined interventions that included practice opportunities to support parent–child shared book reading practices with toddlers. The results of their review advance knowledge regarding behavioral and language-based features of parent–child shared book reading with toddlers. Their findings suggest that parent training and coaching can support effective parent strategy use; however, future studies need to focus on accurately capturing and reporting fidelity of intervention of shared book reading interventions as well as infant and toddler outcomes. These gaps must be addressed to identify the best approaches to support parents in shared book reading strategies and their impacts on child outcomes. Hamberger and colleagues describe a single case design in which they examined the relationship between Bug-in-ear online coaching and strategy use by parents of young children with language disorders in their article, “Parent Coaching in Natural Communication Opportunities Through Bug-in-ear Tech-nology.” This innovative coaching approach was moderately effective in increasing parents’ use of strategies within natural communication opportunities. Also, parents maintained their use of the strategies after coaching was withdrawn. The authors extended the use of Bug-in-ear technology from the classroom to homes with parents. This innovation provides opportunities to improve efficiency and access to familycentered care. In the third article, “Incorporating Video Feedback Within a Parent-Implemented Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Intervention Package via Telepractice,” Ousley and colleagues, utilized video feedback to support parent strategy use and child communication targets. They utilized a rigorous single case research design to examine how video feedback via telepractice impact parents’ implementation of behavioral strategies and in turn influence child communication. Their results provide preliminary evidence that an intervention package that consists of parent-training, joint reflection, and video feedback, all of which are delivered via telepractice, can successfully increase parent use of naturalistic developmental behavior interventions. Their results advance what we know about supporting parents virtually and remotely to implementing evidence-based practices. The fourth article, “Parents Outcomes of ParentMediated Intervention for Toddlers with Autism” by Liu and colleagues highlighted parents’ roles in parent-implemented intervention approaches by conducting a secondary data analysis of 60 parent participants who were part of a larger study of joint attention mediated learning (JAML; Schertz et al., 2018). They examined parents’ application of the mediated principles learned in the interventions when interacting with their children with autism. Findings showed that parents in the intervention group showed significant improvements in their competence in mediating child learning when compared to the control group. This is important as understanding parents’ uptake of intervention strategies is likely to be associated with children’s outcomes. 1127339 TECXXX10.1177/02711214221127339Topics in Early Childhood Special EducationEditorial editorial2022