PREPARED

Watch the research team talking about Project PREPARED in AOTF Intervention Research Grant Recipient Webinar Series.

PREPARED: Parents Responding, Engaging & PARticipating for new Environments for children with Disabilities.

This project will build the capacity of a multidisciplinary research team to meet the needs of diverse parents of young children with DD and design a PREPARED intervention approach.

Parents of young children with developmental disabilities (DD) begin a lifelong process of advocating for physical, social, and service environments that meet their child’s needs. When we talk about the environment, we mean everything that surrounds us. This includes the people, places, and things in our homes and communities. It even includes the policies and rules in services and organizations that provide services to families and children with disabilities.

Over time parents learn to respond to things in the environment that make it hard for young children with disabilities to participate at home, pre-school, and the community. However this learning process is often one of trial and error. Early childhood is an ideal period to teach parents an easy-to-use framework to effectively problem solve environment barriers faced during childhood.

Project TEAM (PT) is a manualized intervention that teaches youth with developmental disabilities (DD) to identify and resolve environmental barriers to participation, but doesn’t involve parents. Our multidisciplinary team of researchers are working together with community partners to develop a PT approach for diverse parents of young children with developmental disabilities using a socio-ecological and health literacy framework. This parent program, PREPARED: Parents Responding, Engaging & PARticipating for new Environments for children with Disabilities, will accelerate the acquisition of skills parents need to identify and respond to environmental barriers at multiple levels (immediate, community, and policy) and maximize children’s participation and development across the lifecourse.

This project is a collaboration between Dr. Kramer at Boston University, and Dr. Lindsay Rosenfeld and Dr. Dolores Acevedo-Garcia at Brandeis University.

This project is funded by the American Occupational Therapy Foundation Intervention Research Grant.

For more information about getting involved in this study.