Errorless Compliance Training

Description of the Strategy

Errorless compliance training was developed to provide an alternative to traditional parent management training approaches for reducing antisocial responses in children. Conventional parent management training involves several components, including teaching parents to reward child prosocial behavior and to use decelerative consequences, such as time-out, following child oppositionality. Notwithstanding the demon-strated efficacy of such strategies, the use of conse-quences like time-out may at times be contraindicated, as some children demonstrate high levels of resistance to parent enforcement of the consequence, potentially resulting in parent-child confrontation and conflict. Given that much developmental research on parenting points to power assertive and coercive parenting styles as early antecedents to future antisocial child behavior, an effective intervention that reduces the need for physically enforced consequences could circumvent prospective negative outcomes.

Errorless compliance training, which can be completed in a parent group or individual format, offers management of child behavior without coercion. With this approach, each parent is asked to categorize a range of household requests into four compliance probability levels (Level 1: “almost always complies,” Level 2: “usually complies,” Level 3: “occasionally complies,” or Level 4: “rarely complies”) based on the current compliance of the child. From this list of parentrated requests, the clinician selects six to eight requests from each probability level and includes them on an individualized data sheet for recording the results of the parent-conducted compliance assessment. Parents are then trained in request-delivery guidelines, including issuing requests only once in a polite but firm voice, using single rather than multiple component requests, and using the imperative rather than the interrogative. Parents are also taught how to record their child's response to the request (compliance or non-compliance). Parents deliver the 24 to 32 requests to their children over the next 2 weeks. This compliance assessment typically results in data on child compliance to about 5 to 10 repetitions of each of the requests. For each child, the clinician calculates the probability of compliance to each request and sequences the requests according to likelihood of child compliance. Requests are then divided into four probability levels, from Level 1 (high probability of compliance) to Level 4 (low probability of compliance).

Following this assessment of compliance probabilities, parents are trained in the use of treatment procedures, including reinforcing compliance (immediate, consistent, enthusiastic, and effective praise or other reinforcement), ignoring noncompliance (no punitive consequences, responding as though the request had never been delivered), and avoiding requests from [Page 823]subsequent levels (using gentle prompts to complete essential tasks that involve requests from succeeding levels). Treatment begins with parent delivery of a high density of Level 1 requests (e.g., “give me five,” “turn on the television”) over the course of several days. Considering the high likelihood of child compliance to these requests, parents are able to provide intensive praise and affection contingent on frequent prosocial child responses. With the greatly reduced probability of noncompliance, consequences such as time-out are unnecessary, and minor problem responses can typically be ignored. Lower compliance probability levels (Levels 2 through 4) are introduced sequentially over several weeks at a slow enough pace to ensure that children continue to comply at high levels, enabling parents to maintain profuse praise and acknowledgment for child cooperative behavior. When Level 4 requests (those that had been associated with severe noncompliance before treatment) are introduced by parents in the last phase of treatment, children typically continue to comply at high levels. By means of this graduated and positive process, substantial treatment effects are obtained without need for punishment or constraints.

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