Early Intervention: Spanish-Speaking Mothers’ Experiences with Esdm

Background: After young children receive a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), providers recommend that parents seek intervention services to support their child’s language, social, and play skills. Often parent-mediated intervention programs utilizing evidence-based developmental and behavioral strategies, such as the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM), are provided. Currently, little is known about the experiences of non-English speaking families who participate in parent-mediated intervention. Given that Spanish-speaking Latino families represent 38 percent of families living in the United States (Krogstad & Gonzalez-Barrera, 2015), understanding their perceptions, views, and beliefs about early intervention services can ultimately help improve the delivery of this intervention and increase the relevance to their needs.

Objectives: To learn about Spanish-speaking mothers’ views, perceptions, and beliefs about the impact of parent coaching in the strategies of ESDM on parents, their child, and their family.

Methods: Nine Spanish-speaking families were invited to participate in a semi-structured interview about their experiences being coached to use the strategies of ESDM (Rogers & Dawson, 2010) over 12 sessions. Notably, these intervention sessions were completed with English-speaking ESDM certified therapists with the assistance of a Spanish language interpreter. The semi-structured interview in Spanish included questions to obtain information about the impact of this ESDM on parents, their child, and their family. For this sample, 6 mothers with a child with ASD and 1 family with a child with Rett Syndrome agreed to participate (two families declined to participate because they did not have time or were not interested). Whereas children’s average chronological age was 45 months (range: 24-65) when they started ESDM, children’s average chronological age was 62 months (range: 45-71 months) at the time of the parent interview.

Results: Using a coding, consensus, and comparison methodology (Wills et.al., 1990) to analyze the interviews, three general themes emerged. First, mothers reported learning a great deal about ASD in general through their participation in the intervention. Second, mothers indicated seeing positive effects of ESDM on their child’s development, including better social, play, and language skills. Finally, mothers reported positive effects on themselves, such as increased patience and emotional regulation during child interactions because they understood their child’s development and ASD better.

Conclusions: These themes suggest that Spanish-speaking families’ experiences were generally positive. They perceived improvement in their child’s development and their own understanding of ASD, which in turn helped them to better cope with raising a child with ASD. Clinically, although it is encouraging that families perceived benefits from this intervention provided by English-speaking providers, it is not known whether there would be greater perceived benefits with a Spanish-speaking provider. Also, given that families from diverse backgrounds tend to receive fewer intervention services than English-Speaking families, future research is needed to improve access to early interventions.