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Parental participation in their young children's rehabilitation has been promoted to increase intervention intensity. Yet, parents' perspectives on increased involvement, including the barriers and facilitators, remain unclear. The objective of this study was to explore parent perspectives of partnering with therapists to administer early, intensive rehabilitation to their children with perinatal stroke. Parents participated in semi-structured interviews before and after partnering with a physical therapist (PT) to deliver a 12-week intervention for their child. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Interpretive description methodology was used to generate knowledge that is relevant for clinical practice. Rehabilitation occurred in the child's home and in pediatric physical therapy clinical sites in three cities in Canada. Twelve Parents (11 mothers, 1 father) of children between 8 months and 3 years old with spastic unilateral cerebral palsy (CP) as a result of perinatal stroke. A diverse group was sampled including single parents, parents of one or multiple children, parents working in and outside the home, families who had immigrated to Canada and families with a wide range of previous experience with rehabilitation. The intervention was ELEVATE (Engaging the Lower Extremity Via Active Therapy Early), a play-based PT intervention targeting the lower extremity of children with CP. The intervention was 1 hour/day, 4 days/week for 12 weeks and was administered by a PT in partnership with parents (2 sessions delivered by each/week). N/A. The three themes were 1) the importance of taking a positive approach to therapy, 2) the focus on maximizing their child's potential, and 3) participating in intensive rehabilitation is "worth it", despite the challenges. Families discussed the importance of making therapy fun, the value of intervening when their child is young, and a number of barriers to participating in intensive rehabilitation including long commutes and requiring child care for siblings. These results will help facilitate meaningful engagement of parents in their children's rehabilitation, especially early, intensive rehabilitation and home exercise programs. None. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The single pellet grasping (SPG) task is a skilled forelimb motor task commonly used to evaluate reaching and grasp kinematics and recovery of forelimb function in rodent models of CNS injuries and diseases. To train rats in the SPG task, the animals are usually food restricted then placed in an SPG task enclosure and presented food pellets on a platform located beyond a slit located at the front of the task enclosure for 10–30 min, normally every weekday for several weeks. When the SPG task is applied in studies involving various experimental groups, training quickly becomes labor intensive, and can yield results with significant day-to-day variability. Furthermore, training is frequently done during the animals’ light-cycle, which for nocturnal rodents such as mice and rats could affect performance. Here we describe an automated pellet presentation (APP) robotic system to train and test rats in the SPG task that reduces some of the procedural weaknesses of manual training. We found that APP trained rats performed significantly more trials per 24 h period, and had higher success rates with less daily and weekly variability than manually trained rats. Moreover, the results show that success rates are positively correlated with the number of dark-cycle trials, suggesting that dark-cycle training has a positive effect on success rates. These results demonstrate that automated training is an effective method for evaluating and training skilled reaching performance of rats, opening up the possibility for new approaches to investigating the role of motor systems in enabling skilled forelimb use and new approaches to investigating rehabilitation following CNS injury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]