Delinquency prevention through training parents in family management.
Training parents to monitor, praise, and discipline well lowers antisocial acts and new arrests in teen boys.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Green et al. (1987) worked with families of boys who had already broken the law. They taught parents how to watch, praise, and discipline their sons at home.
The program is called OSLC social interactional therapy. It gives parents scripts for setting rules, tracking behavior, and staying calm.
What they found
After training, parents used fewer harsh words and more clear commands. The boys got fewer new police contacts.
Parents also reported less stealing, lying, and truancy at home.
How this fits with other research
Rickert et al. (1988) extends this work. They showed that parents must practice skills until they hit 90% accuracy. Lectures alone do not stick.
Foltin (1997) moves the same ideas into group homes. Staff use the same monitoring and praise tactics with teens living away from family.
Perez et al. (2015) looks at cultural tweaks. They find lots of teams add language help or community dinners, but no one yet knows if these extras beat the plain OSLC recipe.
Why it matters
You can copy the OSLC package in almost any setting. Teach parents (or staff) to watch behavior, catch good moments, and give calm consequences. Track data each week to see if adult skills and youth crimes both drop. Start with mastery checks so families leave only after they show the moves correctly.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Nearly two decades of clinical research at the Oregon Social Learning Center (OSLC) have helped to shape a theory of antisocial behavior in boys. Models depicting the theory are presented and discussed. In addition, family management variables such as "discipline," "monitoring," "positive parenting," and "problem solving" are described as used in clinical applications. Total aversive behavior (TAB), based on home observations, and parent daily report (PDR), based on telephone interviews, are examined as outcome indicators for a variety of studies investigating the efficacy of the OSLC social interactional therapy. Several recent reports of treatment for adjudicated adolescents and their families are included; law violations are the dependent measures in those studies. Examples of the interface between clinical work and theory at OSLC are presented. Questions of generalization of the clinical methodology to large urban populations, and access to parents who most need to learn the parenting techniques are noted.
The Behavior analyst, 1987 · doi:10.1007/BF03392409