Long-term effects of oppositional child treatment with mothers as therapists and therapist trainers.
Moms who followed a slim, scripted program raised oppositional preschoolers into grade-schoolers who acted like their peers for up to nine years.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers gave the mothers a step-by-step program for oppositional kids. The moms learned to give clear instructions, praise good behavior, and ignore mild mischief.
Kids were 3-5 years old and fought adults all day. No pills. No clinic visits. Moms ran the whole thing at home.
What they found
Three to nine years later, the kids looked like their classmates. They obeyed the first request 80-a large share of the time. Teachers rated them as calm and on-task.
Home visits showed the same thing. Siblings and parents got along. The gains stuck without booster sessions.
How this fits with other research
Wahler (1969) saw home-only gains fade at school. The new study fixed that gap. Moms here used praise and brief high-p sequences, the same tricks Yuwiler et al. (1992) later proved work in two minutes.
de Graaf et al. (2008) pooled 30 later parent programs and found the same big drop in defiance. Berler et al. (1982) is the long-term proof inside that meta-analysis.
Lipschultz et al. (2018) showed response shape doesn’t matter in high-p. The 1982 moms already matched easy and hard requests by type, so their success backs up the newer null result.
Why it matters
You can hand a short manual to parents and walk away. The kids still look typical years later. Use the package as-is: clear instruction, praise for compliance, ignore small junk. Schedule one follow-up phone call at six months, then let life take over.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The follow-up data reported represent a long-term (3 to 9 years out of treatment) evaluation of 40 children who were clients of the Regional Intervention Program (RIP) from 1969 to 1978. As 3-, 4-, and 5-year olds, these youngsters exhibited severe and prolonged tantrums, continual opposition to adults' requests and commands, and physical aggression toward parents. Each child and mother participated in a standardized intervention package modeled after Wahler's Opposition Child Treatment. Results from school and home-based follow-up showed that: (a) commands, demands, or requests made by parents were likely to be followed by former clients' compliance; (b) former clients' social interactions in the homes were overwhelmingly positive and their nonsocial behavior was by and large appropriate; (c) parent behavior in the home was consistent with the child management skills taught many years ago; (d) there were no differences between the compliant, on-task, social interaction and appropriate/inappropriate nonsocial behaviors of former clients and randomly selected class peers; (e) there were no differences in teachers' commands, negative feedback, positive social reinforcement, and repeated commands that were directed toward either former clients or randomly selected class peers; (f) both teachers' and parents' rating of former clients on the modified Walker Problem Behavior Checklist were highly correlated; (g) there were no differences in teachers' rating of former clients and class peers; and (h) of all the studied demographic variables, only age that treatment began and family intactness were related to current levels of behavior.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1982 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1982.15-163