Young children's externalizing behavior problems, including oppositional and defiant behavior, noncompliance, tantrums, whining, aggression, and destruction of property, are early and stable predictors of later academic failure and social deviance. Interventions that are based on behavioral/social learning theories and that teach parents effective ways to manage such child behavior are the recommended and empirically supported treatments of choice. As successful as these programs are, some maternal risk factors have been identified that predict the degree to which mothers and/or children experience treatment benefits. When a standard parenting intervention is augmented with components designed to address issues related to one of these risk factors, outcome is improved. The current application describes the development of an augmented intervention specifically for angry mothers of 2-3 year old oppositional children. The augmented intervention is based on, and will be compared to, Webster-Stratton's BASIC (1993) treatment. Two intervention components will be added to BASIC: anger management as in Deffenbacher & McKay (2000) and a motivational interviewing feedback session as in Miller & Rollnick (2002). The ultimate goals of the augmented intervention are to decrease maternal anger and to improve the initial and long-term effectiveness of treatment for these mothers and their children. The more immediate goals of this treatment development application are to a) develop a motivational interviewing feedback session and modify an anger management program to serve the needs of these families, b) merge these two components with a standard parenting intervention to form a 12-session augmented parenting intervention, c) compare the effects of the augmented intervention to the effects of the standard 12-session parenting intervention with respect to mothers' anger expression and use of dysfunctional discipline strategies; and with respect to their children's externalizing behavior problems in a sample of 30-36 mothers of 2-3 yr old oppositional toddlers, and d) modify the treatment protocol in preparation for a more comprehensive evaluation of the augmented treatment.
| Del Vecchio, Tamara; Rhoades, Kimberly A (2010) Bidirectional Influences in Mother-Toddler Dyads: An Examination of the Relative Influence of Mothers' and Children's Behaviors. Infant Child Dev 19:516-529 |
| Rhoades, Kimberly A (2008) Children's responses to interparental conflict: a meta-analysis of their associations with child adjustment. Child Dev 79:1942-56 |
