Music Therapy with Neonatal Intensive Care Unit-Discharged Mother–Infant Dyads: Developing a Method for Nurturing Communicative Parental Efficacy (CoPE with Music)

While much advancement has been documented in the practice of music therapy in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) environment, there is currently a shortage of music therapy-based methods for NICU-discharged dyads. Back in their homes, mothers might feel alone, lacking guidance, and possibly losing their parental efficacy and their ability to communicate with their baby. In this article, we present a method for nurturing the communicative parental efficacy (CoPE) that was successfully practiced with several NICU-discharged dyads. In eight weekly sessions, the music therapist improvises with the dyad and focuses on (1) containing the mother’s emotions; (2) modeling musical interactions with the baby; and (3) practicing these musical interactions with the mother, enabling her to gain communicative parental efficacy. The basic ideas of CoPE are outlined, and a short case study is then described, to demonstrate how it is used. Finally, suggestions for future directions for the development of CoPE are provided.

“Involved Is an Interesting Word”: An Empirical Case for Redefining School-Based Parental Involvement as Parental Efficacy

School-based parental involvement is a common practice in the United States, and yet there is an emerging view that parents’ involvement in schools may have little if any academic benefit for their children. However, such conclusions are often based on narrowly construed survey questions, such as “Did you attend PTA in the past year?”. In our study, we re-examine commonly used measurements of school-based parental involvement using 130 interviews with parents and administrators across three diverse elementary schools. We compare conventional survey measures of school-based parental involvement with our own qualitative assessments of parental efficacy. Notably, we find that highly efficacious parents employed a wide range of involvement strategies, undetected by some traditional metrics of involvement (i.e., attending PTA meetings). As expected, we also find that efficacious parents were largely advantaged themselves and concentrated in advantaged schools. However, school contexts can play a powerful role in shaping the reception of parents’ engagement with schools—the presence of a Spanish immersion program transformed how teachers and administrators interpreted the involvement activities of Latinx parents. Our results point to the importance of (1) recasting parental involvement as parental efficacy and (2) integrating school contexts to understand how efficacy can be more effectively encouraged and deployed.

A comparison of the relationship between parental efficacy and social support systems of single teen mothers across different family forms in South African low socioeconomic communities

Background Teenage parenting is recognised as one of the greatest health and social problems in South Africa. Research in South Africa has shown that by the age of 18 years, more than 30% of teens have given birth at least once. Teen mothers may feel disempowered because they are ‘othered’ and consequently, may develop forms of resistance which in most cases may inhibit their ability to parent. Social support is therefore, an imperative intervention for successful teen parenting but this is not clearly understood in South Africa. This study aimed to compare the relationship between parental efficacy and social support systems of single teen mothers across different family forms. Methods A quantitative methodology with a cross-sectional comparative correlation design was conducted with 160 single teen mothers who resided with a family in a low socio-economic community. The participants completed a self-report questionnaire that comprised of the Social Provisions Scale, and the Parenting Sense of Competence scale. Descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation were used to investigate the data. Results A significant positive relationship between social support and parental efficacy was found. When comparing different family forms, single teen mothers’ residing with one parent reported greater levels of parental efficacy and single teen mothers’ residing with two parents, re-counted high levels of social support under the subscales; guide, reliable and nurture. However, when computing for guardian-skip generation, results show that there is no significant relationship between parental efficacy and social support. As well as no correlation across subscales of social support. Conclusion The positive relationships between social support and parental efficacy are important for planning and applying parenting programmes amongst single teen mothers and facilitating awareness regarding the importance of social support and family forms when considering parenting practices.

The effect of early autism intervention on parental sense of efficacy in a randomized trial depends on the initial level of parent stress

This study examined whether style or intensity of child-focused intervention had a secondary effect on parental sense of efficacy and whether these effects varied by baseline level of parent stress. We randomized 87 children with autism, age 13–30 months, into one of four conditions: 15 versus 25 intervention hours crossed with 12 months of Early Intensive Behavioral Intervention versus Early Start Denver Model. Baseline parent stress was the putative moderator. Parent sense of efficacy, collected at baseline and the end of treatment, was the dependent variable. Analyses used generalized linear mixed model with full information maximum likelihood estimation. We tested main effects and interactions involving time, treatment intensity and style, and baseline parent stress to test moderation effects. Changes in parent efficacy across 12 months were related to intervention intensity but not style; this effect was moderated by level of parent stress at baseline. Parents with higher stress at the beginning of a 1-year, home-based, comprehensive intervention program had a higher sense of parenting efficacy if their child received lower intensity intervention; parents with lower stress at baseline had a higher sense of efficacy if their child received higher intensity intervention. Lay abstract This is a study of the secondary effects of interventions for young children with autism on their parents. Specifically, we were interested in the impact on parent’s sense of efficacy, or how confident and competent a parent feels about themselves as a parent. We tested three ideas: (1) that the style of the intervention, whether it was more or less structured and whether the parent had a more or less formal role, would impact a parent’s sense of efficacy; (2) that the intensity of the intervention, how many hours per week the intervention was delivered, would impact parental efficacy; and (3) that the parent’s level of stress prior to intervention would impact how intensity and style effected efficacy. We randomly assigned 87 children with autism, age 13–30 months, into one of four conditions: 15 versus 25 intervention hours crossed with two different styles of intervention. We used statistical tests to examine these ideas. We found that parental efficacy was related to intervention intensity but not style. Parents with higher stress at the beginning of a 1-year, home-based, comprehensive intervention program had a higher sense of parenting efficacy if their child received lower intensity intervention; parents with lower stress at baseline had a higher sense of efficacy if their child received higher intensity intervention. If a parent can emerge from the process of diagnosis and early intervention with an increased sense that they can make a difference in their child’s life (i.e. increased sense of efficacy), it may set the stage for meeting the long-term demands of parenting a child with autism.

Using Behavioral Insights to Improve School Administrative Communications: The Case of Truancy Notifications

Many states mandate districts or schools notify parents when students have missed multiple unexcused days of school. We report a randomized experiment ( N = 131,312) evaluating the impact of sending parents truancy notifications modified to target behavioral barriers that can hinder effective parental engagement. Modified truancy notifications that used simplified language, emphasized parental efficacy, and highlighted the negative incremental effects of missing school reduced absences by 0.07 days in the 1 month following compared to the standard, legalistic, and punitively worded notification—an estimated 40% improvement over the standard truancy notification. This work illustrates how behavioral insights and randomized experiments can be used to improve administrative communications in education.