Dyadic Creative Arts Therapies-based Intervention for Children With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

The experimental dyadic CAT-based intervention will promote mutual sensorimotor play, pretend play, songs, and games among the mother-child dyads while encouraging flexibility, creativity, and enjoyment. This intervention will involve eight weekly 45-minute sessions in the families' homes and will be conducted by trained creative art therapists. The dyadic CAT-based intervention will follow a manualized protocol presenting the goals, principles, and proposed activities for the intervention sessions. It will provide instructions for maintaining intervention fidelity, while allowing flexibility to tailor the meetings to each dyad's strengths and needs. The dyadic CAT-based intervention meetings will be recorded using video camera.

This intervention will involve only mothers and will be conducted by trained parent counselors with experience in working with IDD. This intervention will involve eight weekly 45-minute sessions performed online via Zoom. The psycho-educational parent counseling will follow a protocol presenting the goals, principles, and central issues in parenting a child with IDD to improve the parent-child relationship and address concerns and difficulties related to the child's diagnosis, development, and behavior. It will provide general instructions for maintaining study validity and replication, while allowing flexibility to tailor the intervention to each family's needs.