Parents can learn how to give effective therapy to their children with
autism, a new study in theJournal of Child Psychology and
Psychiatryfinds.
Researchers at Stanford University looked at a type of therapy called
Pivotal Response Training (PRT), which is one the of the handful of
treatments shown to be effective for kids on the autism spectrum, says
Kari Berquist, PhD, study co-author and a clinical instructor in
psychiatry and behavioral sciences and an autism clinician at Lucile
Packard Children's Hospital Stanford. The therapy focuses on improving
kids' motivation language skills by reinforcing their use of language
related to the task at hand. One of the advantages is it can be done
anywhere: anytime a child attempts to ask for something by name--a toy,
say--they'd be rewarded with the item they requested, which reinforces
their use of language.
They enrolled a group of parents of 53 autistic children between ages
2-6 in either a PRT course, which taught parents how to do the therapy
with their kids, or a psychoeducation group, which taught general
autism information. The children joined their parents for several
sessions.
Researchers found that after just 12 weeks, 84% of parents were able
to learn how to give effective PRT, and the children in the PRT group
made significantly more progress than the other group in use of
language and how often they were communicating.
"Group models are very new to autism treatment," says Berquist, but
the study shows that they can be effective while also being cheaper
and coming with a built-in social support for parents. "I think this
really allows us to get more people at once, to give more services at
one time."
--Time
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