Parenting and Occupational Therapy: An Exploration of Global Practice.
Margaret McGrath, Anne Honey, Fidaa Almomani and 18 others
Most OTs working with adults collect parental status but rarely use formal tools to assess parenting.
Intervention is mostly emotional support and problem-solving. Adaptive equipment for parenting tasks is the least used, so a parent needing equipment-based help may not get it.
Key findings
1Three-quarters of respondents (74.7%) had not received additional training in occupational therapy for parents, and 48.7% rarely or never used a formal assessment tool to evaluate parenting performance.
2Among those who intervened, individual tailored support was the most common mode (59.5%), emotional support and problem-solving the most frequent specific intervention, and prescribing adaptive equipment for parenting the least used.
3Therapists who rarely or never worked on parenting roles were more likely to lack parenting-specific training, practice in East Asia and Pacific or Europe and Central Asia, and have a smaller proportion of clients who were parents.
Still to come
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
Convenience sampling through professional networks means the response rate cannot be calculated and the sample is not known to be representative of all OTs working with adults. Respondents were likely more interested in parenting than the average OT, so the gap between what OTs could and do offer may be larger than reported. The survey was newly developed for this study. Although it was piloted and reviewed internationally, questions may have been read differently than intended. Cultural variation in parenting beliefs and practices may have shaped how therapists in different regions perceived and reported their practice. Self-report of practice, not observation. Therapists may report what they think they should do rather than what they actually do.
Declared interests
Evelina Pituch holds a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Fellowship. The authors declared no other conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the 48.7% who rarely assess parenting as the full picture of the profession. The sample was self-selected through professional networks, so respondents were likely more interested in parenting than the average OT. The true gap between what OTs could offer and what they do may be larger than this survey shows. Also, the regression findings are associations from a single cross-sectional snapshot, not evidence that training or caseload composition causes more parenting-focused practice.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →