Treatment Readiness among Primarily Latine Families Seeking Parent–Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) in an Urban Setting

(1) Background: Given the high prevalence of childhood mental health problems and their long-lasting negative consequences if left untreated, it is important to investigate factors that affect family engagement in psychological interventions such as Parent–Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), including caregiver treatment readiness and readiness for change (RFC). Specifically, Latine families experience greater mental health disparities and have unique cultural factors that affect engagement. The current project examined caregiver pretreatment readiness among primarily Latine Spanish- and English-speaking families. (2) Methods: Participants were 100 caregivers (96% female) of young children ages 2 to 7 who sought PCIT services from a community mental health center in Washington, D.C. Families completed written and observational assessment measures at pretreatment and throughout PCIT, which were used for the current study. (3) Results: Caregivers reported high readiness and importance of treatment at intake, with higher RFC among Spanish-speaking caregivers. Regardless of language, caregivers who reported more frequent and problematic child misbehavior and who were from a multi-caregiver household tended to report more RFC and treatment importance at intake. Pretreatment RFC also predicted family completion of the first phase of PCIT although there was a high attrition rate for the sample as only 18% of families completed treatment. (4) Conclusions: These findings provide insight into the implementation of standard PCIT among Spanish- and English speaking families and highlight the benefits of assessing pretreatment caregiver readiness to inform clinical decision-making

Using Parent-Child Interaction Therapy to develop a pre-parent education module

The current study examined outcomes related to a pre-parent education module based on two sessions from the Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) treatment protocol. The study included 300 undergraduate non-parents aged 19 to 25 who were enrolled in psychology courses at a large state university. Student knowledge of positive parenting skills and demonstration of effective behavioral parenting skills were examined through a self-report measure and an analog behavior observation. Exposure to the pre-parent education module resulted in significant increases in scores on a PCIT content quiz and frequency of praise during the role-play behavior observation from pre- to post-test. The results of this study suggest that undergraduate non-parents are open, and able, to learn about parenting strategies during a classroom-based parent education module. These findings highlight the feasibility of teaching parenting skills as a preventive strategy during pre-parenthood.Pre-parent education Child abuse prevention Parent-Child Interaction Therapy

Dataset for “SpecialTime: Automatically Detecting Dialogue Acts from Speech to Support Parent-Child Interaction Therapy”

Parent-child interaction therapy (PCIT) helps parents improve the quality of interaction with children who have behavior problems. The therapy trains parents to use effective dialogue acts when interacting with their children. Besides weekly coaching by therapists, the therapy relies on deliberate practice of skills by parents in their homes. We developed SpecialTime, a system that provides parents engaged in PCIT with automatic, real-time feedback on their dialogue act use. To enable automatic classification of spoken dialogue acts in parent-child interaction, we created a dataset of 6,022 parent dialogue acts, annotated by experts with dialogue act labels that therapists use to code parent speech. We developed an algorithm that classifies the dialogue acts into 8 classes with an overall accuracy of 78 %