Empowering Parental Caregivers

"The group included one-hour, weekly Zoom sessions, that were facilitated by an occupational therapy doctoral candidate (first author) for 7 consecutive weeks. During the first session, the candidate explained adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies and asked each participant to identify one adaptive coping strategy that they currently use and will continue to use in the future. The candidate then explained the FOCUS problem-solving approach. For each session afterward, the candidate presented a topic-related scenario for parents to identify an effective solution using the FOCUS steps (APA, 2011). Parent-chosen topics included recreation, assistive technology, motivating and advocating, physical activity, skin integrity, and adaptive fashion. The general process of the meetings is presented in Figure 1. After every meeting the candidate sent out a summary of resources that were discussed during the meeting, ultimately putting them all together in an Empowering Caregiver Guide."