Short-term multidisciplinary family-centered workshop for preschool children with global developmental delays

Abstract

Background: Children with developmental delays have a great impact on their families. Educating families on how to interact with their children is an important task. Therefore, we assessed the short-term effectiveness of the workshop for children with global developmental delays.

Methods: In total, 101 children aged 18-36 months with global developmental delays, all with language delay along with other developmental delays, and their parents participated in six 2-h family-centered workshop sessions for six weeks. Measures were taken before and after the workshop, including the Mandarin-Chinese Communicative Developmental Inventory, Peabody Developmental Motor Scales, Emotional Competency Rating Scales, Pediatric Outcomes Data Collection Instrument, Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory, Pediatric Daily Occupation Scale, Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory (PedsQL), Caregiver Strain Index, and PedsQL-Family Impact Module.

Results: Significant improvements with a small or intermediate effect size in emotions, upper extremity and physical functioning and global functioning, daily occupation performance in sensorimotor, communication, cognitive autonomy, and psychosocial domains, and parental quality of life and family impact were noted with high workshop satisfaction.

Conclusion: Short-term family-centered workshop is effective for children with global developmental delays. However, due to the lack of follow-up after the intervention, it should be careful in inferring the developmental gain effect.

Impact: The effectiveness of short-term family-centered workshops on children with global developmental delays remains uncertain. Short-term family-centered workshops improved the children's emotions, physical functional performance, and occupational performance in daily life. The short-term family-centered workshop is practical and effective for children with global developmental delays. Further long-term, large-scale, prospective, randomized trials are warranted to confirm these results.

Clinical trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT05418933.