Multi-Media Professional Development for Parenting Educators to Deliver Oral Hygiene Education for Parents of Young Children

Project Summary/Abstract Approximately one out of three 2- to 5-year-old children in the United States has experienced caries (tooth decay). The American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry and American Academy of Pediatrics provide recommendations for preventive strategies, and recognize that infant, toddler and early childhood oral health is one of the foundations upon which preventive education and dental care must be built to enhance the opportunity for a lifetime free from preventable oral disease. Parents struggle to adopt these preventive strategies at the same time that challenging behaviors emerge in children’s psychological development. This combination can make it very difficult to build the foundation of oral health practices that the AAPD recommends. There is a strong body of evidence supporting the use of behavioral parenting strategies in dealing with child behavioral problems. The proposed project introduces behavioral parent training strategies in concert with efforts to address other known parental barriers to provide an effective vehicle to promote oral health with a universal prevention intervention. A private/public collaboration between Oregon Research Behavioral Intervention Strategies, Oregon Research Institute & Oregon Community Foundation leveraged resources and competencies to create a prototype of a commercially viable coordinated oral health prevention intervention program, BeReady2Smile (BR2S). The program promotes dental health and targets parents of young children attending parenting education classes and families receiving home visiting services through Head Start. The innovation in the effort was to introduce behavioral parent training strategies, in concert with efforts to address other known parental barriers, to provide an effective vehicle for promoting dental health with a universal prevention intervention. The program includes a video that can be shown in parenting education classes to engage parents on oral health and a mobile/web application to drive behavioral change. This Phase II project builds on that work and on a successful Phase I pilot by providing professional development tools to prepare parenting educators to use BeReady2Smile in both parenting group and home visit settings. The goal of this proposal is to complete development and evaluate our technology-based professional development tool, BeReady2Smile_ProD, within an RCT. The program has great potential for sustainability and cost-effectiveness for the distal training of Parenting Educators using both Home-based and Group-based delivery methodologies. The long-term goal of the program is to help parents provide the foundation for a lifetime free from preventable oral disease.