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AbstractFamilies play an important role in supporting children’s learning and behavioral health. School psychologists are ideally situated to promote family–school partnerships, home–school collaboration, and enhance positive parenting practices on behalf of students. When American schools closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, many families experienced increased stress and caregiving burden associated with supporting their children at home. We delivered a behavioral parent training program via telehealth to 42 Spanish-speaking Latinx parents of preschool children with developmental delay (DD) and elevated behavior problems during the pandemic. We used an implementation framework to examine acceptability, adoption, appropriateness, feasibility, fidelity, and implementation cost of the telehealth approach for this sample. Our findings suggest overall positive implementation outcomes for Latinx parents of children with DD. We discuss key implementation issues that are relevant to school psychologists delivering consultation and family-centered interventions to support families and students from diverse backgrounds.Impact StatementParents of children with disabilities experience heightened stress and caregiving burden, likely exacerbated by the school closures associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. We delivered a behavioral parent training program via telehealth during the pandemic to Spanish-speaking parents of preschool children with developmental delay to support parenting at home. Study findings suggest strong support for the implementation outcomes investigated.

ABSTRACTParents of children with developmental delays (DD) consistently report higher levels of stress compared to parents of typically developing children. Elevated parenting stress is concerning, not only because of the associated poorer physical and mental health outcomes for the parents but also because of its role in the development of behavior problems and subsequent psychopathology in their children. A growing body of research suggests that Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is effective in reducing parenting stress and child behavior problems among families of children with DD; however, there is a shortage of studies examining whether the effects of MBSR in this population are maintained in the longer term. In the current study, we used a waitlist-control design to examine whether MBSR directly improved parental mental health (i.e., parenting stress, depression, and satisfaction with life) and indirectly reduced child externalizing and internalizing behaviors. Eighty parents of children with DD between the ages of 2.5 and 5 (M = 4.18, SD = 1.01) were randomly assigned to an immediate treatment group or a waitlist-control group. Results indicated that parents who received MBSR reported significantly greater improvements in mental health outcomes as well as reduced child behaviors related to attention and withdrawn behaviors compared to parents in the control group. Further, changes seen through MBSR were maintained at a 6-month follow-up assessment. These findings suggest that improvements in parent and child outcomes through MBSR may have longer term benefits for families of children with DD.

This review includes recent research pertaining to family functioning when there is a child or adult offspring with intellectual disability. The purpose was to broaden the examination of families research from an adjustment/coping perspective to consideration of more contextual factors (environment, culture, service delivery).