The effects of a home-based intervention for young children with intellectual disabilities in Vietnam.
One short parent-coaching visit each week for a year doubled adaptive-skill gains for Vietnamese preschoolers with ID.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lam et al. (2009) tested the Portage Curriculum in Vietnam. Trainers visited homes once a week for one year.
They taught parents how to run short lessons with their preschoolers who had intellectual disability. A control group got no coaching.
What they found
Kids in the coached group gained more personal-care and motor skills than the control kids. Gains showed up on the Vietnamese Vineland after twelve months.
How this fits with other research
Kim et al. (2005) ran a similar home program in Korea four years earlier. Both studies found the same thing: weekly parent coaching lifts adaptive skills in Asian preschoolers with developmental delays.
Ingersoll et al. (2024) later moved the idea online. Their Project ImPACT telehealth study kept the parent-coaching heart, but swapped home visits for Zoom. Results still held: parents used more strategies, kids talked more.
Li et al. (2025) pushed the age up. They let teens with mild ID teach themselves daily-living skills through iPad videos, no parent needed. Skills still rocketed. The line of work shows a clear path: start with parent-led lessons for tots, then hand more control to the learner as they grow.
Why it matters
If you serve families of young children with ID, schedule weekly home visits or tele-sessions that give parents one clear lesson at a time. Keep the same coach; build trust. Track progress with the Vineland every six months. When the child hits late elementary, start shifting to self-managed tools like video prompts so gains keep rolling after parent hours fade.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: This study was conducted to examine the impact of a 1-year intervention for children with intellectual disabilities (ID) in Vietnam. METHOD: Subjects were 30 preschool-aged children with ID (ages 3 to 6 years). Sixteen were assigned to an intervention group and 14 to a control group. Based on the Portage Curriculum (CESA 5 2003), the intervention trained parents to work with their children through modelling and coaching by teachers during weekly home visits. RESULTS: Comparison of pre-, mid- and post-intervention assessments of the children based on the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (Sparrow et al. 1984a) indicated that the intervention was promising: children in the intervention group improved significantly in most domains of adaptive behaviours, and also performed significantly better than the control group in the areas of personal care and motor skills. CONCLUSIONS: The results from the Vietnam programme are discussed in terms of its implications and strategies for developing programmes for children with disabilities in developing countries.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2009 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2008.01151.x