Serious delinquent behavior as part of a significantly handicapping condition: cures and supportive environments.
Treat chronic teen delinquency like a lifelong disability that needs a lifelong supportive family plan, not a brief program.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The authors looked at teens who keep getting arrested. They asked: should we give these kids a quick fix or long-term help?
They wrote a position paper. They said serious delinquency is like a lifelong disability. It needs a lifelong support plan, not a short cure.
What they found
The paper does not give new data. It argues that the Teaching-Family model should last for years, not weeks.
The goal is to build a new family environment around the teen. This support stays in place even after the youth turns 18.
How this fits with other research
Killeen (1995) agrees that quick punishments fail. That paper moves the fix into schools by changing the whole school climate. M et al. move it into the home for the long haul.
Eisenhower et al. (2006) also reject short cures. They push school-wide skill classes. M et al. say the family, not the school, must become the lifelong support.
Khemka et al. (2016) show one brief class can boost refusal skills. This seems to clash with M et al., but the clash is only timing. A short class can start the change, yet M et al. say the family still needs to back it up for years.
Why it matters
Stop writing 90-day discharge goals for chronic delinquency. Write 5-year family-support plans. Use the Teaching-Family approach to train parents and siblings. Keep weekly contact even after court involvement ends. Think "disability support," not "boot camp cure."
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The past 20 years have been productive ones for the field of applied behavior analysis. A brief review of our own efforts during this period reveals that we have accomplished several but not all of our goals for the Teaching-Family approach. In this context, we note that the setting of realistic and appropriate goals is important for the field and for society. Moreover, we suggest that the realistic goal for some persons with serious delinquent behavior may be extended supportive and socializing treatment rather than permanent cure from conventional short-term treatment programs. We base this suggestion on the accumulating evidence that serious delinquent behavior may often be part of a significantly disabling and durable condition that consists of multiple antisocial and dysfunctional behaviors, often runs in families, and robustly eludes effective short-term treatment. Like other significant disabilities such as retardation, autism, and blindness, the effects of this condition may be a function of an interaction of environmental and constitutional variables. We argue that our field has the wherewithal to construct effective and humane long-term supportive environments for seriously delinquent youths. In this regard, we explore the dimensions, rationales, logistics, and beginnings of a new treatment direction that involves long-term supportive family treatment. We contend that such supportive families may be able to provide long, perhaps even lifetime, socializing influences through models, values, and contingencies that seem essential for developing and maintaining prosocial behavior in these high-risk youths.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1987 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1987.20-347