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Background. Intellectual disability in children with intellectual disabilities makes it hard for them to do their daily activities, especially their daily living skills. One of the most troubling daily living skills or self help for children with intellectual disabilities is feeding skills. Feeding skills should be taught to children with intellectual disabilities. It is evident that parents do not give enough opportunities for their children to practice and hone their skills. Parents give too much help for their children, rush, and provide not quite proper teaching because the parents lack of information. Studied research before found that 90% of parents who had children with intellectual disability didn’t receive training or any kind of information concerning treatment for their children.  It causes the children to not develop their skills. “MANDIRI” guide’s is an guide that will be given to parents in order to teach feeding skills to children with intellectual disabilities. MANDIRI guide book is a guide book  with steps which use behavior modification techniques that could be learned by parents to teach children with intellectual disability. Several researches criticize that there were many available guide or manual guidance but were not valid. This present research aims at conducting validation process of MANDIRI guide and empirical test aims it can increase knowledge of parent’s to teaching their children’s feeding skills.

Methods. Design used in this research is one group prestest posttest only design. Subjects of the research is mothers of children with moderate intellectual disability categories. The validating  process of the book is done by applying content validity test and implementation of the guide book by parents to their intellectually disabled children. Content validity test is applied by using professional judgement involving 7 expert panelists who scored the contents of the guide book. Implementation of the guide book is studied by applying quasi experiment method with one group pretest posttest design involving 13 subjects who have meet inclusion criteria. The Measurement of this research were knowledge tes,  parents diary activities as manipulation check and evaluation check of mandiri guide book. Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test data analysis was used to test differences in the scores of knowledge of teaching intellectual disability Feeding skill.

Result. The findings indicate that the guide book MANDIRI has a significant content validity with V values ranging from 0,82 to 0,92 on each aspect of its content. The guide book MANDIRI potentially increases the parents’ knowledge in training feeding skills to intellectually disabled children with z value of -3,215 (p<0,05).

Conlusion. Based on the result of the research it can be concluded: 1) The “MANDIRI” guide book was proven valid content wise, which means that the content in the “MANDIRI” guide book was in accordance with the purpose, theory, indicators that is wanted and achieved. 2) The result of the research showed that reading the “MANDIRI” guide book can increase knowledge in teaching eating self-help skills of parents who have children with intellectual disability.

Added Value. This research helps the availability of information resources for parents on how to teach feeding skills for children intellectual disabilities. Where no valid guidebook for parents has been provided and suitable to the characteristics of the child before. This study also answered that parents can obtain information through independent learning activities through reading activities. The implication of this research give contribution in developing the science of educational psychology so as to the MANDIRI guide book becomes valid and could be used by mothers to train their children. This guides book also can help parents to get some information about how to teach their children appropriate, according to their characteristic and their need through parents independent learning activities. This book content also explained how to teach their child’s feeding skill with one of the psychologyical method that fading and prompting. Where this method has been tested effectively improve the ability of children.  This book also can be one of the psychoeducation intervention methods for parents which can be learned independently, easy to reach and using anywhere. Finally, this guide book is hoped to be able to teach parents to practice feeding skills of children with intellectual disability gradually until they can survive independently in taking care of themselves and function socially in society.

Keywords: daily living skill; self help; intellectual disabilities; feeding skill; parents

Word Count : 700 Words