Abstract
Purpose: The PREPARED study explores strategies that parents of young children with developmental disabilities in early intervention use to be effective, lifelong advocates of their children's needs. Most current interventions focus on children's disabilities. Therefore, our end goal is an intervention training parents in critical thinking strategies to tackle barriers to their children's participation across physical, social, and service environments. We define participation as engagement in socially and culturally relevant activities. Methods: Multi-phase, exploratory study. We conducted two literature reviews: 1) environmental barriers to young children's participation and 2) interventions that support young children's participation at home and in the community. Next, we are interviewing (n=10) and running focus groups (n=2) to explore how families navigate barriers and support their children's participation. We explicitly recruited families regularly under-represented in the research (i.e. race, poverty, and language). Results: Our review uncovered 5 relevant articles on exploring barriers to young children's participation, largely focused on individual body structures and functions, or skill deficits. Also, interventions supporting young children's participation seem primarily speech or social pragmatic programs. Emerging interview findings from discussions with parents indicate they do possess a small range of approaches to resolve barriers across levels, but the strategy set appears limited. Conclusions: A new critical thinking training for parents of young children with disabilities can help families generate multiple strategies to increase children's participation. The new approach can help parents systematically identify and resolve environmental barriers to their children's involvement in valued activities at home, school, or in the community.