Behavioral training for mothers of mentally handicapped children: teaching of self-help skills
Mehta, M.; Pande, P.; Bhargava, M.
Indian Pediatrics 28(8): 909-915
1991
ISSN/ISBN: 0019-6061 PMID: 1808079 Document Number: 319697
Psychiatrists enrolled 37 mothers of 3.5-8 year old children with an 70 IQ who came to the Child Guidance Clinic at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi in a behavior training study designed to give the mothers the tools they need to train their children in self help skills. They assessed each child and gave a questionnaire to the mothers prior to and after training. They asked mothers to record observations of behavior systematically. They also counselled each mother on her child's condition and involved them in selecting target behaviors to modify and reinforcers. Mothers learned various methods of developing self help skills in individual and group sessions. These methods included reward assessment, reward training, task analysis, prompting, shaping, chaining, modelling, and imitation. they also received training on teaching toilet training, feeding, bathing, and washing, and dressing. Dressing was the self help skill with the highest frequency of deficits (45.4%) whereas toilet training was the least (13.6%). Mothers preferred to dress the children rather than take the time to teach them to dress themselves. Since mothers did not record behavior and the children did not exhibit good toilet behavior at the clinic, considerable deficiency most likely did exist with toilet training. Only 54% of mothers attended 50% of training sessions so they learned only 2-3 task analysis steps. Further only 32% of mothers returned 6 months after the training sessions. Pre and post tests showed that mothers' knowledge improved in recognizing mental retardation as an illness. they also learned that their children can learn simple tasks. Yet they attributed undesirable behavior to physical abnormalities and did not try to modify this behavior. Further mothers tended not to reinforce positive behavior. Further research is needed into simplifying methods of assessing and monitoring skill level.