About the program

The Signposts for Building Better Behaviour program equips parents with strategies that promote positive behaviour in their children with an intellectual or developmental disability. 

Program structure

The program can be delivered as:

• 6 to 8 x 2 to 2.5-hour fortnightly group sessions delivered in services
• individual face-to face delivery at parents’ or carers’ home or clinic.

Signposts Early School is a variation of the program for typically developing children of early primary school age.

Evaluation and effectiveness

Signposts has been evaluated using a quasi-experimental design (Hudson, Matthews, Gavidia-Payne, Cameron, Mildon, Radler & Nankervis, 2003). Families involved in the evaluation were assigned to a control waitlist group (n=27) or 1 of 3 intervention groups: 

1. group support (n=46)
2. telephone support (n=13)
3. self-directed (n=29).

The outcomes of this study demonstrated positive results for parents that received the intervention indicating that they were less stressed and more confident in their parenting ability than those in the control group.

A complete list of Signpost studies are available on the Parenting Research Centre website.

References

Hudson, A. M., Matthews, J. M., Gavidia-Payne, S. T., Cameron, C. A., Mildon, R. L., Radler, G. A., & Nankervis, K. L. (2003). Evaluation of an intervention system for parents of children with intellectual disability and challenging behaviour. Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 47(4/5), 238–249. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2788.2003.00486.x