Impact of the Family-Centered Positive Behavior Support Approach and Parent Monitoring on the Improvement of Behaviors in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

This research examined the effects of the family-centered positive behavior support (PBS) approach and parent monitoring on the behaviors of young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and their parents. The family-centered PBS approach involved collaboratively selecting target behaviors and routines, parental monitoring of children’s target behaviors, planning behavior intervention strategies for each routine based on ABC analysis results, coaching parents on the strategies, and providing feedback on the outcomes of the parents’ implementation of the strategies. The results confirmed that the family-centered PBS approach was associated with enhancements in the children’s target behaviors. Additionally, the findings validated that the parents may apply the behavior intervention strategies to nontrained routines. Possible factors that influenced this outcome were that the parent monitoring may have functioned as a self-monitoring of the parents’ behaviors that the checklist in the parent monitoring may have served as a discriminative stimulus for the implementation of the intervention plan, that feedback promoted parents’ attention to the situation where the target behaviors occurred, and that the parents were relatively positive about their parenting.