Efficacy of Parent-Child Interaction Therapy with Deaf/hard of hearing Children and Families

Deaf and hard of hearing communities experience barriers to obtaining fully accessible and affirmative mental health care services.

These barriers include limited research on the efficacy of mental health treatments and outcomes of clinical services with individuals who are deaf and hard of hearing. This leads to the disparity in the number of deaf and hard of hearing individuals who are able to obtain culturally and linguistically affirmative mental health services.

Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) is one of the few interventions that has been adapted for and studied with diverse deaf and hard of hearing families. Post-treatment outcomes from a small sample of clinically-referred families include an increase in parenting skills, a reduction in disruptive child behaviors, and overall parental treatment satisfaction.