Parent peer coaching program: A cascading intervention for parents of children with autism in Mongolia.
Train one parent well through Zoom and they can spread high-fidelity ABA to a whole network of families.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team trained Mongolian parents of children with autism to become peer coaches.
They used Zoom to teach the first parents, then those parents taught others.
Everyone lived far from big-city clinics, so all coaching happened online.
What they found
The parent mentors used the ABA steps almost perfectly.
The families they coached also nailed the communication and behavior tricks.
Kids got more chances to talk and play because parents kept the plan going at home.
How this fits with other research
Barkaia et al. (2017) first showed that telehealth can train therapists across oceans.
Kremkow et al. (2022) swaps therapists for parents and still gets top-quality results.
Dai et al. (2023) gave parents only online videos and saw weak child gains.
The new study adds live mentor calls, proving that people need a person, not just a playlist.
Gevarter et al. (2021) and Peters et al. (2023) also used brief Zoom coaching, but they stopped at one family.
Mongolia went bigger: trained parents trained more parents, like a snowball of good teaching.
Why it matters
You can copy the snowball model anywhere internet reaches.
Pick one sharp parent, coach them live, then let them mentor five more.
You save hours, reach villages, and keep quality high without flying a BCBA in.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Choose your most accurate parent, give them a 30-minute Zoom tutorial, and ask them to coach two new parents this week.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Parents of children with autism are known to experience severe hardships related to raising their children. These hardships are exacerbated in low-resource settings internationally where there is very little resource for children and their families, including professionals who provide evidence-based treatment. Mongolia was chosen as an example of such low-resource settings in this single-case research, and four parent mentors and five parent peers and their children with autism participated and completed the study. A local parent group, the Autism Association of Mongolia, was actively involved in this study and helped with recruitment, development, adaptation, and implementation of the intervention to increase acceptability and feasibility. In addition, a local bilingual research assistant was also utilized as the purpose of this study was to build capacity of diverse stakeholders of children with autism in Mongolia. The research assistant was trained and coached by the research team on both content (communication teaching strategies and behavior management) and delivery (coaching adults), who then provided coaching to parent mentors via live videoconferencing in Mongolian. Parent mentors then similarly provided coaching to parent peers after observing the interactions with their children with autism. The findings suggest that parents can effectively deliver high-fidelity coaching to disseminate evidence-based treatment in low-resource settings when given proper training and coaching. Further examination on scalability and sustainment of effects is suggested.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2022 · doi:10.1177/13623613211070636