Effective Parent/Caregiver Coaching
Parent/caregiver coaching is designed to empower parents to address their child’s challenging behaviour. Strategies and protocols are developed on an individual basis to meet the needs of your family while being based in applied behaviour analysis.
This program is a series of coaching sessions between you and a behaviour analyst. Your child may or may not be present for the session. You will be asked to collect data on the target behaviours and this will be analyzed with your therapist. Our BCBAs are OAP approved Clinical Supervisors and this program meets the Ontario Autism Program eligibility criteria.
Steps in Parent/Caregiver Coaching
- Assessment
We begin by meeting to discuss your family situation and to develop a list of goals that you would like to achieve through the parent coaching. Goals can be based on present challenges you’re facing or potential challenges that you can foresee. Lindsey will ask you to collect some baseline data to gather more information about what is currently occurring and to help guide the coaching process. We will also agree upon the frequency of parent coaching sessions.
- Plan Development
Following the assessment we will develop your parent coaching plan. Similar to a behaviour intervention plan for your child, you will receive a written coaching plan that lays out specific targets for intervention, replacement behaviours, data collection and teaching protocols. You will also receive sample data sheets to help guide your data collection.
- Training and Implementation
We use a Behavioural Skills Training model to teach you how to implement the new skills you’ll be learning. The four steps to this model are: teach, model, rehearse and give feedback. You will have an opportunity to practice the new skills with Lindsey before you implement them with your child.
- Monitoring and Updating
We will closely follow your implementation of the strategies provided in your coaching plan. We will review the data you collect. We will work with you to troubleshoot any issues that arise during the implementation of the coaching plan.
Sometimes changes to the plan are necessary. We will work with you to optimize the strategies that are included in your coaching plan.
A main goal of this service is to empower you to generalize the skills you learn with a specific challenging behaviour to other challenging behaviours that may arise in the future.