Impact of Environmental Enrichment Training to Parents in Improvement of Communication and Sociability of Children with Autism Spectrum

Autism is a neural _ developmental disorder in childhood. An autistic child has different problems in social and communication skills with repetitive behavior. The objective of study is to evaluate the effectiveness of environmental enrichment training to parents in improvement of communication and sociability on autistic children.
This experimental study performed by pre-post test. Population of study includes all of students between 7_12 years old from Aein-Mehrvarzi school in Tehran were recruited through available sampling and randomly assigned to two control and experimental groups. Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist was used as instrument for measuring improvement of children with autistic features. At first, both of groups were taken pretest and then experimental group trained environmental enrichment for four months. Then, both of groups were taken post test and after a month were done follow-up test. Data were analyzed by ANOVA with repeated measure.
Result showed that environmental enrichment training to parents was effective on improvement of communication and sociability (p According to benefits of parental intervention in treatment and importance of increasing therapy sessions for children with autism, it is recommended that this therapy method in conjunction with conventional methods is offered to parents of children with autism specially mothers.