Training Family Day Care Providers to Work with Special Needs Children

Abstract

This paper describes short-term results from a program designed to train family day care providers to work with special needs children. Thirteen providers participated in training sessions and biweekly on-site consultations, and began to mainstream young handicapped children into their family day care homes. Six months after the start of training, the trainees' attitudes towards handicapped children, knowledge about programming for the disabled, and utilization of physical space for enhancing child growth and development were compared to pretraining levels on these measures. Results demonstrated overall significant positive change for the trainees from pre- to posttraining. The paper discusses these findings and their implications.