Parental perceptions of behaviors in preschool children.

A comparison of parental descriptions revealed that mothers of developmentally delayed children listed fewer deviant behaviors than did mothers of behaviorally disturbed children, but significantly more than mothers of non-clinic children. The Washington Symptom Checklist, used in this research, proved a useful clinical tool.

Help-seeking mothers and their children.

Forty-three mothers sought help with management of childhood behaviors. Presenting complaints in half or more of the families included stubbornness, talking back to parents, disobedience and other traits indicative of parent-child interaction difficulties. Pretreatment behavioral observations revealed that mothers shared common characteristics of being low in positive warmth and high in negative and oppositional responses. The children were observed to share common traits of little independent play, frequent frustration, and either ignored their mothers or were verbally and physically oppositional. Behavioral counselling and monitored rehearsal served to reverse many of the behaviors. Almost all mothers reported reduction in problem behaviors. Mothers varied widely in attributing usefulness to different program components.

Reduction of stress between mothers and their handicapped children.

This paper reports the results of videotaped baselines and a series of behavioral instruction sessions that involved 28 preschool handicapped children and their mothers. The behaviours of mother and child were analyzed from videotaped records before, immediately following, and nine months after the behavioral instruction sessions. The intervention, the instruction sessions, focused on enrichment of the mother-child interaction repertoire and was accomplished with immediate feedback to the mother by using the bug-in-the-ear device. The frequencies of the 216 measures of negative behaviours tested (12 behaviours in each of 18 dyads) decreased in 48 instances immediately following the instruction sessions. Forty of these changes were still present nine months later. The research indicates it is possible to reduce stressful, negative interaction and, in addition, to maintain the mother's behaviors of warmth and acceptance.

A mother instruction program: behavior changes with and without therapeutic intervention.

Mother-child behavior changes over therapeutic intervention and no-contact periods were compared. Fifteen dyads had 8 weeks of instruction followed by no contact; 15 followed a reversed schedule. Overall change was about the same in both groups, and both changed more during instruction than during no-contact periods. Mothers receiving immediate instruction showed greater and more systematic immediate changes following instruction. Children in the group with later follow-up exhibited a greater proportion of behavior change during that no-contact period than during instruction. Thus, no-contact periods cannot be considered no-change periods, though immediate intervention probably ensures more systematic change than intervention preceded by waiting-list experience.

A mother-instruction program: Documenting change in mother-child interactions.

Measures of mother-child interaction change are reported in a series of 30 mothers and their children, aged 2 to 10. Videotaped play sessions were analyzed in detail to provide baseline measures from which individualized modification guidelines were derived. Mothers were instructed in eight weekly sessions via bug-in-the-ear. Postinstruction observations provided quantification of observed changes following instruction. The target of change was mother-child behavior contingency patterns, effected by intervening into the mother component on those patterns. Measured changes in mother and child behaviors, mother-child contingency patterns, and mother's preceptions of child behaviors are compared.