Occupational Performance Coaching With Parents of Young Children With Developmental Disability

The OPC intervention comprises three components: (1) connect - building parents' trust in the coach by using verbal and nonverbal strategies; (2) structure - building parents' competence by adopting a problem-solving framework of setting goals, exploring options, planning action, carrying out plans, checking performance, and generalizing; and (3) share - building parents' autonomy by reciprocally exchanging information between the coach and parents with an emphasis on eliciting parents existing knowledge. During the exploration of the options for a particular goal, collaborative performance analysis is used. The coach follows the four steps to (a) identify parents' perception of what currently happens, (b) identify what they would like to happen, (c) explore barriers and bridges to the desired performance, and (d) identify their needs for taking actions to achieve goals. Parents are guided to find strategies to facilitate their child's performance to support goal achievement.

The parent consultation consists of the use of the toolbox to provide parents with available environmental resources and strategies to enhance community participation of their child with developmental disability, followed by the understanding of current situation and the identification of problems encountered by parents. Direct informing approach will be used to instruct parents about the availability of environmental resources close to their living areas and what they can plan to do by using possible supportive strategies. In addition, information about child disability and/or developmental milestone may be provided if needed.