SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

Social Work Practice



Social Work Practice

Key Role 1

Riza is seven years old and shows signs of anti social behaviour. He cries, shouts at his mother and also become angry at small issues. The parents must understand that central to the development and implementation of parent training programs for child antisocial behaviour has been the study of how such behaviour develops and is maintained. In order effectively to address child behaviour problems, it is necessary to understand these issues, as they have direct application to all parenting interventions discussed in this chapter. Thus, in this section, we will briefly summarize from Forehand and Long how child characteristics and parenting can interact to create family processes that place a child on a trajectory to antisocial behaviour (Samuels, 2001, 511).

In the case of Riza, the roots of antisocial behaviour are sometimes found in a child's temperament. The work of Thomas and Chess identified some children as having 'difficult' temperaments early in life. From their infancy, these children are usually restless, intense, distractible, and moody, tend to sleep irregularly, and to have problems adjusting to changes. Longitudinal research has shown that, without intervention, a difficult temperament can be a predecessor to later antisocial behaviour.

Fortunately, effective parenting can improve many of these negative behaviours. However, parenting a temperamentally difficult child is not an easy process and many parents unfortunately fall into unwise parenting practices, known as 'traps.' As parent training researchers have delineated, there are two reinforcement 'traps' that often disrupt parenting behaviour. Both serve to exacerbate the child's problematic behaviour, particularly non-compliance, which has been viewed as keystone behaviour in the development of antisocial behaviour of children.

The negative reinforcement trap, as described by Patterson, occurs when a parent issues a direction to a noncompliant child ('Johnny, please pick up your toys'). The child is likely to respond by whining, protesting, or refusing to comply with the command. A parent may 'give in' or 'give up' by withdrawing the direction, to stop the child's protesting or to complete the designated task in a timelier manner. However, doing so unintentionally reinforces the very behaviour that the parent is attempting to avoid. The child learns that loud protestation and defiance nullify undesirable parental directions (negative reinforcement). Thus, not only does non-compliance increase, but so do other behaviours that are precursors of antisocial behaviour (Shotter, 2002, 175).

Frustrated, the parent may then try to 'get tougher' by yelling or even becoming physically aggressive with the child when he or she is non-compliant. In this case, the child stops protesting or complies out of fear, thereby negatively reinforcing the parent's 'tough' behaviour. Over time, both parent and child escalate their negative behaviour via the negative reinforcement processes. This results in a coercive and destructive cycle within the parent-child relationship. The goal of a parent training program is to stop this coercive cycle by teaching the parent better adaptive responses to noncompliant behaviour. The effectiveness of such a program, in part, lies in how well these new parenting behaviours ...