Emergency Training with Mothers Who Are Mentally Retarded

Abstract

The purpose of the present article was to develop and validate a tool to assess knowledge of how to respond to common home emergencies and to validate a training program for mothers with mental retardation on how to respond to emergencies. Four mildly mentally retarded mothers were trained following a multiple baseline procedure in which one emergency at a time was introduced. Two of the mothers acquired most of the information for all of the emergencies and were able to apply the skills in a role playing situation. One mother dropped out before followup and the other mother had difficulty in acquisition, losing most of the gains after followup. While these results are encouraging, further work is needed with larger samples. Other research also should examine the relationship between maternal characteristics and acquisition of both knowledge and skill.