The Application of the Nurtured Heart Approach in Parenting of Children with Special Needs: A Systematic Review

Children with emotional-behavioral adjustment problems need special support and different methods to shape desirable behavior and prevent psychological damage. A variety of parenting approaches are being developed to reduce the adjustment problems of children with special needs and their parents' psychological well-being. Therefore, the present study was carried out with two goals: to introduce the nurtured heart approach and its application in the parenting of children with special needs; to investigate the effectiveness of Nurtured Heart Approach (NHA)

This study was done based on the systematic review with the PRISMA (2010) statement and purposive sampling method. The literature resources were searched in Google Scholar, Eric, SSRN, Wiley, and PubMed databases by the nurtured heart approach, intervention, parent education programs, and parenting keywords. In the first step, 1421 resources and then 32 (22 research; 10 books) written sources were found. Nineteen resources were chosen based on inclusion and exclusion criteria in the screening stage. 

 Findings showed 13 researches investigated the intervention based on the NHA (1409 total sample size in 1997-2022) to reduce challenging behavior of children with learning disability (LD), Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), Conduct disorder (CD), and Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In other reviewed texts, this psychological and family-oriented approach has been confirmed.

 The results of this systematic review showed the NHA is based on the parent-child interaction. Thus parents' awareness and education improve the adaptive and social-behavioral skills of children. Therefore, it is suggested the NHA be used in the field of parenting for children with special needs in Iran.