CONCLUSION
Preterm infants are at a higher risk of developmental delays when compared to their term‐born peers. Early intervention programs are applied to reduce these adverse outcomes. Explorer Baby and NDT programs enhance the development of preterm infants and improve the total stress levels of mothers. There is no significant difference between the two groups regarding infants’ development and parental stress. Both methods improved the developmental trajectories of premature infants and reduced overall parental stress, but not to a statistically significant degree. Both methods can be implemented as early intervention programs because they showed beneficial effects on the developmental trajectories of preterm infants and overall parental stress. The Explorer Baby program may be a preferred option for supporting neurodevelopment in preterm infants, as the program showed greater skill acquisition (not significant) and did not place an additional burden on parents’ overall stress levels. The Explorer Baby program is also well suited for national early intervention systems that prefer a frequency of 1 per month. These results encourage further studies to examine the effectiveness of the Explorer Baby early intervention program in different diagnostic groups, at different intensities, home visits, telerehabilitation, and well‐child visits. We recommend the use of both norm‐referenced and motor performance assessments in early intervention research related to the first year of life.