Parents of special needs kiddos often need support to understand how children communicate through their behaviors. Parent training programs can help parents take a step back, gain perspective of what the child is doing, and develop responses that help a child to learn and grow. Immersive virtual reality can serve as an efficient way to put the parent in the child's shoes and gain some important perspective. Here are some initial thoughts about how to use Floreo as part of a parent training program.
Let's think of a young child who is just starting school and isn't used to common daily school conventions such as sitting in a group, raising a hand and waiting to be called on, and letting other children have a turn first. In a regular education school, many children who are used to watching other children in their environment and imitating their social behaviors can observe these conventions and mix in well with the group. But, children who aren't used to watching and imitating social behaviors can quickly get left behind and remain on the outskirts of the group. Now, consider putting a parent in a Floreo lesson such as Start the Gestures Game where these social conventions are addressed. The training clinician could ask this parent to take the perspective of their child, think about what their child might be feeling, what their child tends to miss in this type of situation. Would the child notice the other children sitting in the group? the teacher sitting in front of the group? The training clinician can help the parent learn ways to support their child in this type of scenario.
Perhaps a school age child is working on differentiating friendly, unfriendly and neutral greetings. A parent could be placed in the Choose Your Greeting Floreo lesson and, again, develop the ability to take their child's perspective and learn effective ways to support the child in gaining new skills. After the parent has this experience in the VR headset, the roles could be reversed and a staff person could play the role of the child while the parent practices using these support strategies.
For this type of training, parents would need to be willing to wear a VR headset. Floreo offers the convenience of being telehealth ready, so the parent could have the VR headset at home, while the training clinician would run the lesson remotely over teleconference.
Immersive VR is a tool that not only has the power to help children who are struggling to understand new social interactions, but can have a similar impact when helping parents widen their perspective.
Floreo's Director of Applied Digital Therapy, Rita Solórzano MA, CCC-SLP, is a Speech Language Pathologist with over 30 years of experience.