The importance of parent involvement in intervention with children has always been recognised by occupational therapists. Current trends in paediatric service delivery have been towards family-centred care, with a central component of this approach being parent-therapist collaboration in planning and evaluating intervention. This paper reviews issues and provides suggestions for clinical practice from the literature on parent-therapist collaboration, including consideration of parents' diversity and unique perspectives, development of effective parent-therapist relationships, establishment of shared goals and priorities when planning intervention, and development of services that support parent-therapist collaboration. Further research is needed in Australian settings to explore the nature of parent-therapist partnerships, the impact of parent participation throughout the intervention process and the extent to which collaboration with parents results in better therapy outcomes for the child and their family.

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Equal numbers of men and women learned a finger maze, with half of the subjects initially using their right hands and the other half using their left hands. To reach criterion, subjects receiving music in the ear ipsilateral to the hand used required more trials than did those receiving no music. Furthermore, when the right hand ran the maze, music played to the ipsilateral ear also delayed learning, compared with music played contralaterally. Binaural music delayed learning when the left hand was used but not when the right hand was used. Possible causes of these effects are suggested. When subjects switched hands and relearned the maze, the number of trials to criterion depended on the group subjects were in during initial learning and not on the group they were in during the hand reversal (response generalization) trials. Although the music condition used determined the effect of music on initial learning and on response generalization, some evidence is presented that indicates that the two effects are not entirely interdependent and that they may even involve different mechanisms.