Background: Staff working in municipal care homes with adults with intellectual disabilities impact their diet significantly. Aim: To explore how external factors influence staff's motivation and performance of nutritional work with these residents. Method: Semi-structured qualitative interviews with 11 staff using systematic text condensation for…

Background: Interventions facilitated by caregivers have gained popularity among those caring for young children with autism. Instructing caregivers on specific techniques to foster social communication skills in their at-risk or diagnosed autistic children has the potential to alleviate concerns about their children's development. Moreover, it…

Care-experienced young people face significant levels of mental distress yet the nature and lived reality of this is poorly understood and undermines the degree to which professional caregivers can provide effective support. This is exacerbated by the lack of 'voice' and control care-experienced young people have as active producers of knowledge…

This 10-year study followed 134 caregivers of young adults with autism and intellectual disability, examining the effects of caregivers' coping strategies, sociodemographic features, and young adult symptomatology on caregiver well-being and depression. Lower caregiver education and higher young adult externalizing behaviors predicted lower…

Caregivers play an outsized role in shaping early life experiences and development, but we often lack mechanistic insight into "how" exactly caregiver behavior scaffolds the neurodevelopment of specific learning processes. Here, we capitalized on the fact that caregivers differ in how predictable their behavior is to ask if infants'…

Infants, toddlers, and two-year-olds with disabilities or developmental delays often participate in center-based childcare. Just like other care and education settings, childcare for very young children should provide high-quality inclusion. To date, minimal research has been conducted on practitioner perspectives about inclusion in childcare for…

Research Findings: The present study examined site and provider characteristics that may be associated with use of exclusionary discipline in center- and home-based childcare sites (N = 320). Higher numbers of suspensions and expulsions occurred at center-based sites and at sites with greater percentages of children of color. Furthermore, sites…

The number of family child care (FCC) providers in the United States, or providers who are licensed, certified, or registered to provide care in their home, fell by nearly half between 2005 and 2017 (NCEQA, 2020a). This has implications for families who prefer FCC settings. Understanding providers' motivations for starting their program may…

Purpose: This study aims to help researchers design observational measurement systems that yield sufficiently stable scores for estimating caregiver talk among caregivers of infant siblings of autistic and non-autistic children. Stable estimates minimize error introduced by facets of the measurement system, such as variability between coders or…

There is a lack of evidence-based programs to support the prevention of child behavior problems designed specifically for foster and kinship caregivers from historically minoritized groups. Drawing on existing best-practice recommendations for tailoring interventions to new cultural and social contexts, this study evaluates initial evidence of the…

Caregiver coaching is an evidence-based practice for autistic children that is poorly implemented in community-based early intervention. Previous studies have identified factors that influence implementation of caregiver coaching in early intervention; however, multi-informant (e.g., caregiver, provider, leadership) qualitative research is…

Research shows that caregivers of children with autism can be taught a variety of behavioral strategies, but there is little research on teaching caregivers to prioritize rapport building over skill acquisition during play. The current study evaluated the effects of a digital training package on the rapport-building skills of four caregivers of…

Among the developmental milestones related to language and communication in early childhood, one that has been the subject of considerable research is response to name (RTN). Delayed or absent RTN in early childhood is a diagnostic marker for autism spectrum disorder and a target behavior in many early intervention curricula. This article…

Tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC) is a genetic condition characterized by both medical and neuropsychiatric diagnoses that emerge across the lifespan. As part of a clinical trial, caregivers of children with TSC were interviewed about their experiences navigating medical, school, and social services. Semistructured interviews (N = 20) with…

Research Findings: Measuring toddlers' cortisol levels both in childcare and at home and their relation to child- and childcare-related factors may help to identify stress-inducing childcare practices and children who are more vulnerable to stress in childcare. Accordingly, toddlers' (n = 320, 51.2% female, mean age = 26.8 months) cortisol levels…