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What Services Are Families of Children with Executive Function Challenges Getting? What Do Parents Say They Want?
Parents of children with neurodevelopmental disorders commonly report unmet needs in regard to the treatment and management of their child’s diagnosis (Brown et al., 2012; Hodgetts, Zwaigenbaum & Nicholas, 2015). While parent trainings are becoming integrated into the service array as an evidenced-based resource (e.g., Postorino et al., 2017; Loren et al., 2015), there are substantial barriers to these services that limit parent engagement and involvement (Martinez et al., 2018). Furthermore, an understanding of the services that parents truly want is lacking.
Objectives:
To investigate child-related services families are receiving, services and supports parents want, and parent availability to participate in school-based parent trainings.
Methods:
We administered online surveys nationwide to 125 parents of children in 3rd through 5th grades with executive function (EF) problems.
Results:
Results show that 5.6% of parents of a child with an ASD or ADHD diagnosis (N=107) reported they had attended a parent training on EF, and 16.3% reported they had attended a school-sponsored parent training of any kind. Parents of children with Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) (N=57) were more likely to have attended a school-sponsored parent training than those whose children did not have IEPs (χ2=4.054). Parents of children who received services outside of school (N=42) were more likely to report greater child EF support than those who did not receive outside services (χ2=7.588). Parents of children with an ASD diagnosis (N=45) reported that their child was more likely to receive EF support compared to those whose child had an ADHD diagnosis (N=60), or those whose child had undiagnosed EF difficulties (N=18; χ2=11.78). Eighty-six percent of parents reported that they would like more training opportunities. More specifically, parents reported that they want, and realistically think they can devote, between 0 to 1000 hours to training, with a median of 10.0 hours, per year. Only four parents (3.2%) said they want zero hours of school-based training per year and three (2.4%) said they realistically are able to devote zero hours to training.
Conclusions:
While rates of EF parent training attendance are relatively low, this is likely due to limited opportunities for training. In this study, parents reported that they would like to receive more training. This information should be used to support increased provision of services to families of children with EF problems.