Living with a child who is mentally retarded: A course in parent education

Abstract

A recent article in the Australian Journal of Mental Retardation by Michael Griffin presented a wide ranging overview of approaches to parent education and training, in coping with their mentally retarded child. The present article describes one such programme in which parents were using developmental checklists to observe the child's behaviour and generate realistic expectations, a knowledge of the child's learning inabilities, and, behavioural analysis techniques to analyze the home learning situation of the child. The programme was shown to change the approach of parents to problem areas exhibited by the child and to potentially increase their effectiveness in managing the child's behavio..