Behavioral Consulting of Tampa Bay has four clinic locations across the Tampa Bay area: Brandon, Carrollwood, Oldsmar, and Wesley Chapel.
What is Parent Training?
Parent training is a service that is provided as a part of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) therapy sessions. Parent training is focused on discussing with and training parents, guardians, and/ or primary family members on necessary skills that will benefit anyone directly involved with the client. Your case manager at BCOTB is always happy to discuss progress with you but is also available to offer 1:1 trainings of skills taught during session. We love working with each of our clients’ families by offering our support and training opportunities!
Why is Parent Training important?
A parent’s involvement in treatment is an essential part of treatment success as your child spends most of their time outside of a clinical setting. Here at BCOTB, we are very proud to offer all our clients with parent training sessions as a part of our services. If everyone on your child’s team is on the same page and being consistent across different environments this can facilitate the development of multiple positive outcomes for everyone involved. It can even lead to faster and more reliable results! It also helps a child generalize those skills learned in the clinical setting and take them into their home, school, and even their community settings. Parent training is a very important factor that can contribute to a child’s success and development.
Some examples of the benefits are:
- Communication – If a goal for your child involves communication, whether it’s one-word responses or a complete sentence, your child will acquire the communication skill at a quicker rate if you learn the strategies with the help of the analyst and the skill will generalize to other environments.
- Feeding therapy – It is essential for children to consume a healthy diet for their health and development. Your child may have food aversion or a texture selectivity, in this case it may be helpful to implement a feeding program. Your child may learn at a quicker and may build a bigger tolerance to different types of food if the analyst shows you how to run this program and how to implement it at home.
- Decreasing problem behaviors- If your child engages in problem behavior and you do not know what to do in those specific situations reach out to your case manager. Parent training for problem behaviors can include different intervention strategies that can help you and your family have smoother interactions. If parents attend parent training sessions consistently, parents will not only learn how to implement those strategies in the clinical setting but will learn to apply them at home, in the community, virtually anywhere!
What do Parent Training sessions involve?
Parent training can be conducted in multiple manners and can be individualized to the clients and/or parent needs. Parent training can be used to target communication skills, feeding therapy, social skills, daily living skills, and even safety skills. We can teach you how to prompt different requests from the kiddo in order to increase independence. Or work on toothbrushing or how to teach multistep skills your child. And even how to walk with an adult safely in different environment.
We offer in person meetings, session observations, and behavior reduction and program implementation training provided by the Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) assigned to the case. On-going weekly or biweekly meetings with the case manager, where any problems or concerns can be discussed and discuss progress with programs and behavior reduction procedures. In these meetings a parent can discuss problem behaviors that occur at home, at school, or in a community setting (like the grocery store). Or talk about issues that only occur with a certain person. It is imperative to have open communication with your child’s case manager and to address any questions or concerns you may have so that your child is more likely to succeed. Another way that parent training is conducted is through session observation. This is where parents and/ or guardians can learn by watching behavior and program implementation procedures implemented by the Behavior Technicians as the Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) explain in detail these procedures and why they are used. If you are a busy parent, we also offer video sessions. This is where we provide the parents with videos explaining treatment procedures, details on how to implement these procedures, and why we are implementing treatments the way we do.
What do Parent Training sessions look like?
During a parent training session, the BCBA will take notes on the items discussed so that everything is documented and followed through as discussed. The BCBA may also write down future programming ideas based on the child’s and family’s needs. A BCBA may assess different skills with the child by conducting parent questionnaires and testing skills. Data may also be collected to provide the parents and/ or guardians with accurate numbers and feedback. This will also help the BCBA determine realistic current and future goals.
Parent training also occurs gradually and at your pace. We can begin with instructions and modeling and whenever a parent or guardian feels comfortable, we can begin role playing and then finally implementation and feedback. It may take a few days or weeks to feel comfortable enough to implement procedures with confidence and that is why we are here to help along the way! It is important to assure that everyone involved is implementing procedures correctly and that is why we provide as much training and feedback as necessary. Our biggest concern is the success and progress that our clients make. We will individualize our procedures and even our training so that everyone is on the right track!
If you are interested in setting up parent training for your kiddo, please reach out to your case manager or Clinical Coordinator and they will assist you with this process!
