China has one fifth of the world's population. By definition, China has the largest number of children with disabilities. Since the 1980s, there have increasing opportunities for children with mild disabilities to be educated in regular classrooms. However, students with severe disabilities, such as autism, have long been kept out of the public schools, both general and special education. Under these special circumstances, parents have become the primary teachers for their children with severe disabilities. The current study examined the effectiveness of a parent training program based on principles and tactics from applied behavior analysis, naturalistic teaching and the TEACCH philosophy in a format that included both group and individual components designed to increase parents' knowledge of autism and its treatment as well as their interactive and teaching skills. A pretest-posttest group design was implemented for this study. Twenty-seven parents in the Northeastern part of China were randomly assigned to either the training or the control group. Parents received a total of twenty hours of training in group and individual sessions. The results demonstrated that parents in the training group performed significantly better than those in the control group on a measure of knowledge of autism and its treatment. They scored significantly higher on the responsiveness and affect dimensions of the Maternal Behavior Rating Scale during free play interactions with their children. Parents in the training group also provided more positive consequences to their children during the teaching sessions with their children. There was no group difference in parents' stress levels before and after the training.
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