Trauma-Informed Behavioral Parenting: Early Intervention for Child Welfare

Untreated trauma exposure in early childhood can lead to immediate health problems which can persist throughout a lifetime. Caregivers often voice concerns about their children who have behavioral health problems like sleep disturbance, feeding problems, tantrums, aggression, and irritability when caring for these children. While several effective parenting treatments exist for these children, they are expensive, not universally available, and therefore difficult to access. Trauma-Informed Behavioral Parenting (TIBP) was developed to bring needed behavioral parenting treatment to Early Steps, a statewide community-based early intervention program. This report presents the results of the implementation of TIBP through five early interventionists in the Bay Area Early Steps Program. Mixed methodology was utilized to evaluate the effects of TIBP on child behavior, caregiver stress and parenting skills, treatment acceptability, feasibility of the program, and therapist fidelity. Specifically, early interventionists embraced TIBP as a practical and helpful home-based program to which they demonstrated high fidelity. Further, caregivers demonstrated great gains in their use of positive parenting skills and reported some reductions in their stress. Some reductions in child disruptive behaviors were reported but they were not statistically significant. Results suggest that TIBP holds promise as a training model for early intervention programs that can positively affect child and caregiver behaviors vis-a-vis a low-intensity and low-cost training model. July 15, 2016 Principal Investigator: Heather Agazzi, PhD, MS University of South Florida Department of Pediatrics