Caregiver-Implemented Interventions to Improve Daily Living Skills for Individuals With Developmental Disabilities: A Systematic Review.
Train caregivers with BST and keep light support at home—86% of strong studies show clear daily-living gains.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Liu et al. (2025) looked at 21 strong experiments where parents or other caregivers ran daily-living programs at home. All studies used kids or adults with intellectual disability or developmental delay.
The team only kept papers that taught skills like brushing teeth, cooking, or laundry. They counted a win if the caregiver’s teaching led to clear skill gains.
What they found
Eighteen of the 21 studies showed the skills got better. Generalization and maintenance data looked good in most of those 18.
The common recipe was BST for the caregiver plus prompting and steady reinforcement for the learner.
How this fits with other research
Hassan et al. (2018) seems to clash at first. They showed caregivers mastered BST in clinic but only used the skills at home after extra in-situ training. Renming’s big picture says caregiver packages work, yet Mahfuz warns clinic mastery is not enough. The gap closes when you see Renming counted studies that added home coaching or feedback loops.
Dogan et al. (2017) and Hood et al. (2017) back the same core steps: model, rehearse, give feedback, then prompt and reinforce the child. Renming’s review widens those single-case wins into a 21-study trend.
Wertalik et al. (2023) tested video prompting instead of live caregiver prompts. Their mixed kid-by-kid results fit Renming’s box that prompting helps, but they remind us the medium can matter.
Why it matters
You can feel safe handing daily-living programs to parents when you give BST plus follow-up. Start with one skill, teach the parent with model-rehearse-feedback, then add prompt fading and praise in the kitchen or bathroom. Check in weekly to tweak prompt levels; the review shows most gains hold only when you keep brief support alive.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Many individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (DD) encounter difficulties in performing daily living skills, which limits their self-sufficiency and autonomy. Caregivers, such as parents, are often the individuals who interact with individuals with DD the most during daily living skills routines. Therefore, it is critical to teach caregivers to implement daily living skills interventions with their children. A systematic review of the literature related to caregiver-implemented daily living skills interventions yielded 38 articles. Of those, 20 articles, with 21 experiments, were rated as high quality based on What Works Clearinghouse design standards. Behavior skill training was the most common strategy used to teach caregivers to implement interventions. Common daily living skills interventions included prompting, reinforcement, and task analysis. The most common form of prompting was verbal prompting, and the most common schedule of reinforcement was a continuous schedule of reinforcement. Of the 21 high-quality experiments, 86% demonstrated caregiver-implemented interventions yielded improvements in daily living skills. Several studies demonstrated generalization and maintenance of daily living skills. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
Behavior modification, 2025 · doi:10.1177/01454455241296514