Clinical Research Directory

Interacting With Children Training for Undergraduates

The adult-child relationship plays an important role in childhood development. Many of the skills and techniques used by adults while interacting with kids sometimes come naturally but often require direct instruction to reach their full potential. Parent management training (PMT) is a type of therapy that directly teaches caregivers how to use relationship building skills to decrease their child's behavior problems. Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) is a research-supported PMT that is designed to decrease behavior problems in children ages two to seven. Given PCIT's wide-reaching benefits, efforts have been made to make the relationship enhancement skills taught in PCIT more available for any adult working with any child. To fill this gap, Child-Adult Relationship Enhancement (CARE) training was created. CARE is a prevention program that teaches any adult working with any child or adolescent ages two to 18 the highly effective play therapy skills taught through PMTs to improve child-adult relationships. In the past, CARE has been looked at among two broad groups (professionals working with children, and caregivers). One recent study looked at CARE in undergraduate students, and participants significantly improved their use of positive play skills and understanding of CARE principles following CARE trainings, showing that CARE was helpful for undergraduates. However, that study's initial evidence supporting CARE among undergraduates did not use a control condition. As such, the current study aims to using a randomized experimental design to compare CARE trainings to a control group among undergraduate students. The investigators believe that the undergraduate participants doing CARE trainings will show more improvements over the course of training compared to the control group, and that participants' motivation will be related to their improvements and training satisfaction. The investigators will recruit undergraduate students at a large university who meet certain eligibility criteria. The participants will be randomly assigned ahead of time to either the CARE training or the control training. All participants will complete several questionnaires and two interactive tasks before and after their trainings to look at their changes in and understanding of play skills. The results of this study will help to improve future CARE trainings for undergraduate students.