Behavioral parent training

Theoretical Foundations

Behavioral parent training is grounded in psychological principles of learning, which are readily accessible by parents, teachers, and others who interact with children. The field of behavioral learning has produced a complex body of knowledge about the moment-to-moment interactions between individuals and their environments, which affect observed behavior. Learning principles have been translated into methods of behavior change that professionals could teach to parents and apply to a variety of child problems. Basically, parenting-training methods are used to promote healthy and positive child behaviors, to replace or prevent unhealthy or problematic behaviors, and to teach specific skills with a variety of child populations.

Early Forms of Parent Training

The first forays into behavioral parent training focused on discrete child problems such as frequent and destructive tantrums or abnormally fearful responses. This work with individual parents was part of the budding field of applied behavior analysis in which children's behavior was observed in social and environmental contexts. The observations were part of what is called functional analysis of behavior to determine which environmental cues and events were maintaining or exacerbating the problematic behavior. A parent participating in behavioral parent training would first keep track of specific events and child behavior, as well as their own behavior, and use the records to help plan the next steps. Parents learned specific child-management techniques that they applied at home while they continued to keep track of progress.

One guiding principle for behavioral parent training is that specific occurrences of behavior are affected by the immediate environmental consequences or events. For parents this means that child behaviors that result in immediate attention from people tend to get strengthened or repeated. For example, behaviors such as tantrums or showing off, which are attempts to gain an audience, get rewarded or “paid off” in a sense by the responses of others. In behavioral parenting training, parents first learn how to observe these kinds of contingent relationships between child behavior and social-environmental response and then how to alter the contingencies for more positive outcomes. For example, parents might be encouraged momentarily to ignore attention-seeking behaviors or to remove their child from situations in which the child could elicit attention from others.

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