One Response to “How does Parent Management Training for children with behavior problems work?”

1. jodybird511 on November 29th, 2006 at 11:29 am

   I'm a psychologist and do Parent Management Training (or other things like it) with folks often. It involves, primarily, working with the parents to develop a system for reducing a child's negative behaviors and increasing their positive ones. The main thing is to set up consequences for a child's behavior and BE CONSISTENT! The way I do it, I start off having parents monitor whatever behaviors (e.g. tantrums, talking back, hitting, etc) they want to decrease–just to have a baseline of how often the behavior is occurring. Then parents and I develop consequences for behaviors and begin implementing them. Once negative behaviors begin to decrease, we begin rewarding behaviors (sitting quietly, doing what they are told the first time, helping, etc) we want to increase. The main thing about Parent Management Training is that it is really about the parents–not the kids. It is training parents to mold their child's behavior by changing the way they react to their child's misbehavior. If the parent isn't willing to put in the effort required for things like charting behavior and being consistent (even when you're tired or it's inconvenient!), then it's not going to take. Good luck References : Reply