Project Summary/Abstract
Approximately one out of three 2- to 5-year-old children in the United States has experienced caries (tooth
decay). The American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry and American Academy of Pediatrics provide
recommendations for preventive strategies, and recognize that infant, toddler and early childhood oral health is
one of the foundations upon which preventive education and dental care must be built to enhance the opportunity
for a lifetime free from preventable oral disease. Parents struggle to adopt these preventive strategies at the
same time that challenging behaviors emerge in children’s psychological development. This combination can
make it very difficult to build the foundation of oral health practices that the AAPD recommends. There is a strong
body of evidence supporting the use of behavioral parenting strategies in dealing with child behavioral problems.
The proposed project introduces behavioral parent training strategies in concert with efforts to address other
known parental barriers to provide an effective vehicle to promote oral health with a universal prevention
intervention.
A private/public collaboration between Oregon Research Behavioral Intervention Strategies, Oregon Research
Institute & Oregon Community Foundation leveraged resources and competencies to create a prototype of a
commercially viable coordinated oral health prevention intervention program, BeReady2Smile (BR2S). The
program promotes dental health and targets parents of young children attending parenting education classes
and families receiving home visiting services through Head Start. The innovation in the effort was to introduce
behavioral parent training strategies, in concert with efforts to address other known parental barriers, to provide
an effective vehicle for promoting dental health with a universal prevention intervention. The program includes a
video that can be shown in parenting education classes to engage parents on oral health and a mobile/web
application to drive behavioral change. This Phase II project builds on that work and on a successful Phase I
pilot by providing professional development tools to prepare parenting educators to use BeReady2Smile in both
parenting group and home visit settings. The goal of this proposal is to complete development and evaluate
our technology-based professional development tool, BeReady2Smile_ProD, within an RCT. The
program has great potential for sustainability and cost-effectiveness for the distal training of Parenting
Educators using both Home-based and Group-based delivery methodologies. The long-term goal of the
program is to help parents provide the foundation for a lifetime free from preventable oral disease.
