| Summary: | Head Start families demonstrate many of the risk factors that relate to the development of noncompliance and other behavior problems in young children, such as low income, limited education, teenage pregnancy, isolation, family stress, single parenthood, and parental psychopathology. Noncompliant preschool-aged children often continue to display difficulties through adolescence. Parent Management Training programs have been developed which can improve child compliance. However, many of the same risk factors that lead to child noncompliance also reduce the effectiveness of parenting interventions. Thus, more efficient assessment and intervention strategies need to be developed to facilitate the treatment of child behavior problems in Head Start families. This proposal attempts to validate the use of the Parent Instruction-Giving Game with Youngsters (PIGGY), a newly developed direct observation system. Using the PIGGY, parents provide standardized commands to their child (e.g., put the book on the table), and parenting skills used to gain compliance (e.g., instruction-giving, praise, discipline techniques) as well as child behavior (e.g., noncompliance) are coded on an observation form. For the first part of study, 14 noncompliant and 14 compliant children and their mothers were selected based on parent report of child behavior. For the second part of the study, two families were selected for a single-case, multiple-baseline (across behaviors) study which used the PIGGY to monitor the effectiveness of Parent Management Training.
|
|---|
