# Multi-media professional development for parenting educators to deliver oral hygiene education for parents of young children

> **NIH NIH R43** · OREGON RES BEHAVIORAL INTERVENTION STRAT · 2020 · $251,165

## Abstract

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 dental 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 I project builds on that work by providing
professional development tools to prepare parenting educators to use BeReady2Smile in both parenting group
and home visit settings. The project features synchronous and asynchronous components and supports distal
training of Parenting Educators who lack specialized oral health training. This scalable and sustainable approach,
BeReady2Smile_ProD, improves the dissemination and implementation of BeReady2Smile (BR2S) and will
enable Parenting Educators to deliver BeReady2Smile 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.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10077654
- **Project number:** 1R43DE030019-01
- **Recipient organization:** OREGON RES BEHAVIORAL INTERVENTION STRAT
- **Principal Investigator:** EDWARD GUSTAV FEIL
- **Activity code:** R43 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $251,165
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2020-09-10 → 2022-09-09

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10077654

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10077654, Multi-media professional development for parenting educators to deliver oral hygiene education for parents of young children (1R43DE030019-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-26 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10077654. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*