1995 Volume 36 Issue 3 Pages 355-359
The value of maternal verbal stimulation to a language delayed child in daily living in enhancing the child's language skills cannot be overstated. Clinicians observe, however, that many mothers encountered in clinical situations are at risk for poor communicative attitudes. For mothers who respond poorly to conventional programs like giving verbal advice or showing models, we developed a weekly 10-session program. The program was based on videotaped information on each mother's verbal behavior toward her child, which was evaluated by both clinicians and the mothers themselves independently according to a 5-item checklist.
We applied this program to seven mothers of language-delayed children of various degrees, causes and symptoms. All mothers wrote of positive effects from our program in questionnaires, although two of them showed no improvement in scores in the videotaped assessment. The post training score of one mother was much higher than that accorded by the clinicians. Pre-/post-training scores by the clinicians did not always agree with those by the mothers.
An advantage of our systematic training program was the mothers' contributions to the evaluation procedures using the same checklists as used by the clinicians. Future research should focus on flexible contents of the checklist, depending on each mother's behavioral patterns, so as to enable presentation of target behaviors for training.
