Autism Training Programs can be more influential than Awareness Camps

According to new findings, published on the Journal of the American Medical Association, training programs for parents could prove being helpful for improving the behavioral patterns of children with Autism.
Researchers keep on learning about this disease, which is believed to affect 1 in every 68 children.

During the study, researchers had randomly assigned 89 parents for receiving training. 91 parents were instead provided with educational information regarding autism. All the parents had a child of ages between 3 and seven years, suffering from Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
The program lasted for nearly six months for both the groups, whether educational groups or training ones. It also included nearly 12 in-person sessions along with a couple of home visits. However, it should be noted that the education programs had not taught the parents about behavior management strategies. Researchers and the study authors considered a drop of at least 25% in the behavioral pattern problems to be a significant improvement.
Interestingly, the findings say that nearly 48% of children, whose parents had received the training instead of education program, had improved their behavioral patterns. Such children had also witnessed a decline in the disruptive behavior as well. The other team, receiving only educational program, had 32% of children with similar levels of improvements.
To obtain the results, a clinician was asked to evaluate the children, based on their behavioral improvements. The clinician was not told about the program that their parents had been assigned. The group receiving training had shown much better scores at nearly 6%, in comparison to 40%. The improvements were also found to last for about 48 weeks.
Study author Lawrence Scahil, MSN, Ph.D. believes that the “parental response” could unknowingly lead to strengthening of their children’s “maladaptive behavior. She is a professor of pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta. She also believes that helping their parents to identify the “antecedent” could be the key to understanding the factors driving their behaviors.