The Ottawa Act Early Autism Project: Does One Hour of Parent Coaching Make Changes?

Background:  This presentation describes the outcomes of fifteen children and parents involved in the Ottawa Act Early Autism Project, a project designed to both identify young children who displayed ‘at-risk’ signs for the diagnosis of autism, and to provide parent-delivered intervention for these children.  

Objectives:  Our project involved an international team of researchers in the area of early identification and treatment and was designed with the following objectives:

1)    To increase community awareness about the early signs of autism

2)    To implement an effective screening of children under 2 years with at-risk signs of Autism

3)    To replicate initial efficacy findings of the Early Start Denver Model Parent Curriculum (Rogers, Dawson, & Vismara, in press) with 15 families

Details will be provided about the 12 weekly one-hour, in –home, parent coaching intervention, and the child and family outcomes will be presented.  

Methods:  A mixed methods design evaluated the outcomes of this project.  

Results:  This presentation describes the processes and objectives used to attain Objectives 1) and 2). We will also present preliminary results pertaining to Objective 3) examining the efficacy of the ESDM Parent Curriculum intervention in terms of parents’ skill usage and child changes in communication and adaptive skills.

In Phase 1, we implemented a successful community awareness campaign with family doctors, pediatricians and front-line care providers, using various media.  During Phase 2 twenty-nine families were identified and invited to participate in an in-vivo screen of their children to determine eligibility for the study. Phase 3 provided 12 weeks of the ESDM parent coaching intervention to 15 families (13 boys, 12 girls), ranging in age from 16 to 27 months of age (mean age = 20.07 months, SD = 3.65). A set of pre-post intervention measures were administered including the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory – Words and Gestures (Fenson, Marchman, Thal, Dale, Reznick, & Bates, 2007), the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales – Parent/Caregiver report form (Sparrow, Balla, & Cicchetti, 1984), and the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (Mullen, 1995).  The ADOS (Lord et al, 1989) was given in the last session to clarify children’s diagnostic presentation. Thus far, statistically significant changes occurred in children’s communication skills. Additional data on individual parent-child profiles of learning will be shared. 

 Results from a focus group, with a small sample of parents involved in the study, identifying strengths and challenges inherent in the parent coaching intervention will also be discussed.  A theme reported by many parents was the feeling of empowerment, as obtained through the parent-coaching process. 

Conclusions:  Successful ways to identify children with early signs of autism were used in this study.  The results support the use of a cost-effective, resource efficient screening method with excellent predictive validity.  Furthermore, the parent-coaching component of the Early Start Denver Model facilitated significant changes in children’s development in only 12 one-hour sessions, supporting earlier findings from Vismara et al. (2009). Parents who participated in the study reported increased confidence as a result of the parent coaching process.