Abstract:
In the home, parents experience difficulties in redirecting their children with ASD to ordinary and commonplace activities during daily routines and everyday tasks. These difficulties can lead to stress for parents and children, especially when the children engage in problem behaviours as a result of these interactions. Parents often lack the skills to implement treatments to reduce challenging behaviours and increase the child’s ability to successfully follow their redirections. In the current research, a BST programme was used to teach parents how to implement Interview Informed Synthesized Contingency Analysis (IISCA)-based functional communication training (FCT). The programme was implemented with four children and their parents. Parents either received early training to implement the treatment alongside the researcher (the ‘hands-on’ method), or training and treatment implementation was delayed until the child mastered the responses with the researcher (the ‘hand-over’ method). Children were aged between 6 and 11 years old, and were all diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Three of the four parents who completed parent training implemented the treatment with high procedural integrity, resulting in increased replacement behaviours and reduced problem behaviour in their children. Overall, BST was effective in teaching parents to implement FCT, and both forms of parent implemented treatment produced considerable positive behaviour change outcomes.
