Supporting Parenting at Home: Empowering Rehabilitation Through Engagement (SPHERE)

Infants with Neurodevelopmental Disabilities (ND) show emotional, cognitive and socio-interactive dysregulation dramatically impacting on caregiving behavior. Parents may report critical emotional burden with heightened risk for chronic levels of distress, depression and anxiety. This constitutes a crucial point considering that parenting represents the first preventive factors for infants' development also in the presence of ND conditions. Thus, it is not surprising that early rehabilitation interventions that focus on the parent-infant dyad have been found to be the most effective in recent meta-analytic study and to be the most rewarding for healthcare systems in terms of economic return in the long-term. Specifically, the VFI constitutes an early family-centered intervention that proved to be effective in promoting sensitive parenting and supporting infants' behavioral and socio-emotional development. The use of VFI intervention has been also documented to be beneficial in dyads of children with neurodevelopmental disability reducing child's disruptive and emotionally negative behaviors; promoting maternal sensitivity, increasing self- efficacy and reducing parenting stress. It should be highlighted that delivering VFI in hospital or home-based context should be highly demanding for the healthcare systems due to high cost and disparities in access to the service for families in remote areas. As such, delivering VFI through telemedicine approaches (e.g., videoconferencing) appears to hold promises of promoting a reduction in inequality of care, greater access to early family-centered support and a more effective and efficient promotion of health outcomes for infants with ND. We still do not know how a VFI support for parents of infants with ND may end up in being effective and efficient in terms of promoting infants' development and parental health. Consistently, the Supporting Parenting at Home: Empowering Rehabilitation through Engagement (SPHERE) project is a randomized controlled trial (RCT) aiming at assessing effectiveness of an early family centered VFI parenting support delivered through videoconferencing on dyads with infants with ND.

The SPHERE RCT will include two arms (see arm description) and three assessment phases: T0, baseline; T1, immediate post-intervention; T2, follow-up (6 months after the intervention). For both arms, standardized assessment sessions will include video-recording of mother-infant interaction and maternal self-report scales (depression [Beck Depression Inventory, BDI; Beck et al., 1961]; anxiety [State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, STAI-Y, Spielberg, 1983] parenting stress, [Parenting Stress Index, PSI; Abidin, 1983] and infants' temperament [Infant Behavior Questionnaire Revised, IBQ-R, Gartstein et al., 2003]).