PARENT BEHAVIOR MANAGEMENT TRAINING PROGRAM
Taught by Dr. Corey Wolff
At The Wolff Center for Child & Adolescent Health, L.C.
To find out when a new session starts or for additional information,
please call our office at 850-474-4777, option 1.

OVERVIEW

Dr. Wolff offers a series of 1˝ hour classes, offered one evening per week over the course of ten weeks.He is currently offering the class on Tuesdays. (A new session will begin the week following completion of a prior 10-week session.).

The current 10-session program is a highly effective, empirically validated program for the clinical training of parents in the management of behavior problem children.  This parent behavior management training program offers a sequence of well-normed procedures for training parents in child management skills. The course is designed to be most helpful to those families with children referred to as having difficult, defiant or aggressive behaviors, and is also quite applicable to children with mild developmental delay. 

The program is designed to be taught by a professional with the education and training in the knowledge and skills necessary to provide mental health services to behavior problem children and their families. Dr. Wolff meets these criteria, and in fact is uniquely qualified to teach it; having both a master’s degree and several years experience in clinical psychology, as well as being a licensed, board-certified pediatrician. Dr. Wolff’s belief is that all parents could benefit from the principles outlined in the program, and is a strong advocate of its principles. 

FOCUS/GOALS OF THE PROGRAM

The main focus of the ten-session course is managing noncompliant/defiant behavior in your child(ren).  Common types of noncompliant behaviors in children include whining, yelling, talking back, ignoring parents, lying, physically resisting, and having tantrums.For purposes of the training program, noncompliant behavior is defined by three general categories, as follows:

1.) The child’s failure to initiate behaviors requested by an adult within a reasonable time after a command given by that adult.

2.) The child’s failure to sustain compliance to a command from an adult until the requirements stipulated in the command have been fulfilled.  Some may consider this behavior category as a form of attention span or sustained attention to tasks (“on-task” behavior).

3.) The child’s failure to follow previously taught rules of conduct in a situation.Such behaviors as leaving one’s desk in class or running off in a department store without permission, stealing, lying, hitting or aggressing against others, or swearing at one’s parents are just a few such behaviors that parents consider to be violations of previously taught standards.

In addition to management of child noncompliance or defiance, the program also focuses on those social processes in the family believed to have helped, at least partially, to develop or sustain the child’s oppositional behavior.Though noncompliance is the most obvious product of these social processes, there are other significant correlates and outcomes as well, such as maternal depression, parental stress and low self-esteem, lack of a sense of parental competence, marital discord, and sibling hostility.  Therefore, along with managing the noncompliant/defiant behavior itself, the underlying family processes are also the focus of this interventional training program.

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This program has a limited number of goals, which are as follows:

  1. To improve parental management skills and competence in dealing with child behavior problems, particularly noncompliant or defiant behavior.
  2. To increase parental knowledge of the causes of childhood defiant behavior and the principles and concepts underlying the social learning of such behavior.
  3. To improve child compliance with commands, directives, and rules given by the parents.
  4. To increase family harmony through the improvement of parental use of positive attention and other consequences with their children; the provision of clear guidance, rules, and instruction to those children; the application of swift, fair, and just discipline for inappropriate child behavior; and general reliance on principle-guided parenting behavior.

 PROGRAM STRUCTURE

With these goals in mind, parents will work toward learning, understanding, and improving techniques targeting the following behavior management skills:

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 EXPECTED OUTCOMES

There is a substantial amount of research supporting the efficacy of the procedures taught in this program.  Each of the methods taught is supported by published studies demonstrating significant improvements in child behavior as a function of these or highly similar behavior management methods.  It is important to note, however, that the degree of success is greatly affected by the extent, nature and severity of the child’s psychopathology and that of the family, among other factors.  With children whose major problem is noncompliance or oppositional behavior and whose families are not seriously dysfunctional, this program usually results in bringing the child’s behavior and compliance within the range considered normal for children of that age group.

Parents with at least a high school education who have minimal degrees of personal or family distress are likely to do quite well in acquiring and utilizing the skills and knowledge taught in this program. The methods taught have received high levels of acceptability when reviewed by other adults or by the parents who are the direct recipients of the training.  Parents completing the training program have reported not only improved child behavior, but also demonstrate changes in directly observed parental behavior and better attitudes toward their children. Parents trained in these child behavior management skills also have reported increased knowledge of parenting skills, reduced parenting stress, an improved sense of self-esteem and parenting competence, better sibling behavior, and better marital and family functioning.

BACKGROUND

The current program design is based on a culmination of over 30 years of research and clinical experience by Russell A. Barkley, Ph.D. and other child behavior professionals. Dr. Barkley is Director of Psychology and Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. The root of the parent training program began in a set of methods developed by Constance Hanf, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus at the University of Oregon Health Sciences Center more than 25 years ago, and was at that time referred to as a “two-stage program” for child noncompliance.Originally, the program consisted of two fundamental procedures designed to teach parents more effective ways of dealing with noncompliance. Parents were first taught an effective method of attending positively to ongoing appropriate child behaviors, particularly compliance with requests, while ignoring inappropriate behavior.After this, parents were instructed in a second procedure consisting of the immediate use of time-out following child noncompliance with a command.In combination, these procedures prove to be a powerful treatment package for parents dealing with noncompliance in their children. 

During the past 20 years, Dr. Barkley expanded and modified the program, in part tailoring it to deal with populations of children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Oppositional Defiant and Conduct Disorders, or more serious behavioral disturbances.The allowance in the program for these disorders was necessitated by the realization that seriously and chronically behavior disordered children are not as consistently responsive to social praise and affection as are normal children.  Hence, a more powerful means of reinforcing child behavior was needed to increase and sustain child compliance with parental requests.The current program has more detailed parental training on not only reinforcing direct compliance with requests, but also on encouraging children to play independently of the parents when the parents cannot be interrupted.


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