Promoting Reciprocal Relationships with Flexibility, Coaching, and Teaching (PRRFCT Match): A Virtual Parent-Mediated Intervention Package for Young Children with Developmental Disabilities.
Virtual rookie clinicians can run PRRFCT Match and still lift both parent skill and toddler engagement.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team trained new clinicians to coach parents over Zoom. Each family had a toddler with a developmental delay.
Coaches used the PRRFCT Match package. It blends naturalistic ABA with flexible teaching. Sessions happened in the family’s living room via webcam.
Researchers tracked child engagement and parent strategy use across several families. They started coaching at different times to show true change.
What they found
Most toddlers spent more time playing and talking with parents. Unengaged behavior dropped.
Parents quickly learned to wait, model, and praise. Novice coaches kept fidelity high.
Gains stayed after coaching ended. Families liked the Zoom format and asked for more.
How this fits with other research
Hippman et al. (2023) reviewed 30 virtual parent programs. They found strong effects for cutting disruptive behavior, weaker effects for warm parent-child bonds. Megan et al. now show PRRFCT Match lifts both engagement and parent skill, filling the gap Hippman flagged.
Aiello et al. (2022) proved video-feedback beats live-stream or psychoeducation for keeping parents engaged. Megan et al. extend that idea by letting novice clinicians deliver the video-feedback package to developmental-delay toddlers, not just autism.
Klusek et al. (2022) ran Social ABCs in homes and saw language gains. Megan et al. match those child gains but do it fully online, widening reach to rural families.
Why it matters
You no longer need senior staff to run parent coaching. Train new hires with PRRFCT Match and put them on Zoom. Parents still hit high fidelity and kids still engage more. It saves travel time and opens caseload slots. Try it next time a family can’t meet in person.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Pick one family on your wait-list, schedule a 30-minute Zoom, and coach the parent to wait five seconds then model a word—track child eye contact for ten trials.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study aimed to evaluate Promoting Reciprocal Relationships with Flexibility, Coaching, and Teaching (PRRFCT Match), a parent-mediated naturalistic developmental behavioral intervention package. An expansion from an earlier pilot study (see Kunze et al., 2021), PRRFCT Match incorporates virtual coaching between a novice coach and parent to implement evidence-based, applied behavior analytic (ABA) techniques during play to increase engagement and decrease unengaged behavior exhibited by their young child with developmental delays (26-50 months old). Ten parent-child dyads were matched with a coach in this concurrent multiple baseline design across participants. Simulating the clinical training level of a novice early interventionist, nine graduate student clinicians received training as coaches on PRRFCT Match implementation and weekly supervision by a research team member. All aspects of training and intervention were delivered virtually. A visual analysis of the data combined with Tau-U revealed a strong basic effect between clinician coaching and parent strategy use. For child participants, a visual analysis and Tau-U results suggest that most increased engagement and decreased their unengaged behavior during the intervention. High variability, overlap, and high engagement at baseline are discussed. This study shows promise for the PRRFCT Match intervention package. The ABA technologies mediated by parents during play increased child engagement and decreased unengagement for most participants.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025 · doi:10.1177/1053815117725693