Interventions That Target the Parenting Processes

Four related areas of family intervention are suggested by the family-delinquency research on parenting processes and parent-child relationships: improving parenting skills, enhancing the care and concern of family members for one another, improving family member's communication and problem-solving skills for coping with conflict, and, finally, addressing maltreatment.
Improving parent management skills.-The most empirically supported area for intervention is parental management skills especially direct control strategies. Behavioral parent training, or social learning family therapy, teaches parents to alter the coercive interactions that promote childhood aggression and later delinquency. Training includes establishing clear and age-appropriate rules and expectations, reinforcing compliance and positive social behavior, and providing consistent discipline for deviant behavior. In order to dispense consequences consistently, parents must track child behavior closely and monitor their children's behavior both in and outside the home. Such a task becomes more difficult, but even more critical, at adolescence, given the strong relationship between lack of supervision and delinquency. Knowing their adolescents' friends and being involved in a network with other parents as well as the school setting may increase parents' ability to monitor. Just as monitoring presents special challenges at adolescence, finding consequences for deviant behavior over which parents have control requires careful planning.
Several generations of rigorous research conducted in a large variety of settings have demonstrated the effectiveness of behavioral parent training, or social learning family therapy, for preadolescent antisocial behavior. Studies have consistently shown that intervention focused directly on changing coercive interactions by teaching parents family management skills can decrease the aggressive behavior of conduct-disordered in the short run. However, change is limited for multistressed and disadvantaged parents, as discussed later. [94] For older adolescents, especially those involved with the juvenile justice system, there is less research and mixed evidence on the effectiveness of social learning intervention on aggression or delinquency recidivism. [95] Patterson and his colleagues at the Oregon Social Learning Center (OSLC) are pursuing some of the most promising research in this area. For example, there is some evidence from a controlled group study that parent training can decrease coercive interactions in the families of young adolescents. [96] When parent training was combined with adolescent group treatment, however, adolescent problem behavior increased, perhaps because of a negative influence from contact with high-risk peers. In another experimental study, a social learning intervention quickly and significantly decreased chronic delinquency, although by 1-year-follow-up adolescents in the alternative treatment also showed significant reductions in rates and prevalence of offending. [97] The most impressive outcome at both the end of treatment and follow-up may have been the significantly decreased institutionalization rate following parent training, particularly given the much higher cost of institutionalization.
Despite some encouraging results, Patterson has indicated that behavioral family management training with delinquency is so demanding of both families and therapists that replicating the OSLC model in community settings may not be feasible. [98] A more practical approach may be the treatment foster care model (TFC) also developed at the OSLC by Patricia Chamberlain. The model trains experienced foster parents in family management to bring the delinquent adolescent's behavior under control. In the process, parents stressed and overwhelmed by their adolescent's delinquency get some respite at the same time they learn parenting skills. They are then supported toward reintegration and management of the adolescent. In one study, TFC significantly reduced incarceration compared with alternative residential care, and the model continues to be evaluated. [99]
Interventions to enhance care and concern.-The second area for intervention is parent-child affiliative relationship and the role of attachment in the origin of delinquency. Addressing the lack of attachment in adolescence is problematic because detached and alienated families are often poor candidates for intervention. [100] However, attachment may be more fluid and changing than has been believed. Peggy Giornadano, for example, in analyzing cases in which lack of attachment did not appear to lead to delinquency, determined from teenagers' anecdotal interview comments that youth who saw hope of improvement in objectively bad circumstances, called the "silver lining effect," were less delinquent than would have been expected. [101] This is important because, in conjunction with the findings from child abuse research that even severely abused children are inclined to view parents favorably, it indicates that small efforts on the part of parents to demonstrate increased care concern may positively affect adolescent behavior and contribute to reattachment. This is indeed the premise of much family intervention with delinquents: a reinvestment of energy by parents, demonstrated by a willingness to take the lead in accepting responsibility to work for change, may contribute to a shift in the adolescent's perception.
"Reframing," a contribution from the family therapy field, is one possible method to both enhance family engagement in treatment and improve family climate by changing adolescents' and parents' hostile perceptions of one another. Therapist reframing may suggest alternative, more benign possibilities for negatively perceived behavior. For example, parental rules and discipline can be reframed as sign of caring and concern rather than authoritarian impositions and evidence of parental attempts to "ruin" the adolescent's life. [102] Adolescent behavior can be reframed in the development context of fitting in with one's friends. Along this line, Henggeler and Charles Borduin suggest reframing problematic behavior as the "adolescent's extreme susceptibility to influence from others" (e.g. peers) and then suggest that parents modify their behavior to help their susceptible adolescent. [103]
Despite the prominence of reframing in the family therapy field, the only findings on its effects on engagement in treatment comes from the therapy process research with families of antisocial children. At the Oregon Social Learning Center, investigations have found that teaching family management skills engenders resistance in these parents but that support and reframing decrease resistance, helping to maintain families in treatment. [104] Related research provides support for the effects on behavior and affect of changing parents' and delinquent adolescents' attributions. In a laboratory study, Cole Barton, James Alexander, and Charles Turner found changing attributions decreased negative and defensive communication. Positive communication did not increase, however, suggesting that reframing might allow "a foot in the door" but needs to be followed by additional skill-building interventions. [105] Additional research findings indicate that distressed families of adolescents endorse a negative and irrational set of significantly more so than do nondistressed families and that beliefs may translate into rigid positions that interfere with communication and problem solving. [106] This also supports the notion that changing beliefs may facilitate improved relationships. In developing an alternative perspective for viewing problematic behavior, reframing may also help parents and adolescents to understand one another's perspectives and develop empathy. Role reversal and exploring parents' own adolescence and struggles for independence may also increase empathy and strengthen the parent-adolescent bond. [107]
Once family members are engaged, fostering family involvement around nonconflictual areas, such as a shared family activity, can increase the positive emotional atmosphere among family members. [108] However, despite the value of parental involvement in their lives, adolescents' preference for spending time with peers or high levels of parent-adolescent conflict need to be taken in account when setting the stage for successful time together. As family members who have been involved in coercive exchanges begin spending time together, both parents and adolescents may lack skills or feel awkward expressing affection and warmth. Particularly during the transition to adolescence, when parent-child interactions begin to shift, families may need help developing appropriate ways to communicate positive emotions.
Finally, it may also be the case that improvements in parental management skills will generalize to improvements in the family climate. This has long been a theoretical premise of social-learning and family-based approaches to intervention. Research on "reverberative change" (i.e., the idea that change in one domain life will be accompanied by change in other domains) provides some empirical support for this notion. [109] However, despite the centrality of family warmth and attachment in the origins of delinquency, there is as yet no empirical evidence that changing family affective relationships decreases delinquency without systematic training in family management as well. [110]
On a prevention note, it is likely to that attachment at early ages is at least equally significant for healthy adolescent development because there are fewer outside influence on the child. Although it does not guarantee successful socialization, a warm, supportive parent-child relationship can provide the foundation for effective parental management practices and the establishment of competent childhood and later adolescent behavior. Therefore, preventive intervention directed toward the formation and support of satisfactory early parent-child relationships may mitigate against aggressive and later delinquent behavior and suggests broader programming possibilities than remedial intervention at adolescence. The influence of programs such as good day care, child abuse education and prevention, parent skills education, and health care for at-risk mothers on enhancing parent-child attachment and preventing later aggressive behavior needs more evaluation. Longitudinal follow-up of the Perry Preschool project, a program to foster development among poor minority preschool children that employed a range of these family support elements, demonstrated positive effects on delinquency and other problem behavior more than a decade later. [111]
Improving communication and problem-solving skills for coping with conflict is often included in social-learning-based family interventions, as well as other family-based work, and there is evidence for effects on recidivism. Alexander and his colleagues have pursued a series of studies on functional family therapy (FFT), a social learning systems approach that targets adolescent problem behavior by changing communication patterns and negotiation skills in families so they more closely resemble interactions in nondelinquent families. Functional family therapy initially focuses on decreasing blaming and developing a collaborative set for working together. Once this has been accomplished, a behavioral skills training phase focuses on modifying parenting deficits and establishing positive communication and problem-solving interactions. The ability to negotiate a solution that offers the best compromise for everyone requires learning to adopt the perspective of another, a skill delinquent adolescents lack. [112]
Treatment outcome studies show that FFT decreases recidivism and out-of-home placement for status offending and serious, chronic delinquents and that change is maintained for up to several years. [113] Importantly, the FFT results show outcomes of increased mutual support and improved family climate, as well as decreased delinquency and recidivism. Even stronger effects on recidivism were found in an independent home-based replication of FFT with disadvantaged juvenile multiple offenders. [114] The long-term effects on interrupting chronicity were especially noteworthy: at 5-year-follow-up, 9 percent of juveniles who received FFT had adult criminal records, compared with 41 percent of delinquents who received only probation services. Taken together, the outcomes from studies on FFT for juvenile delinquents are promising.
Addressing maltreatment.-Maltreatment is also an important target for intervention because it is linked with not only delinquency but also many adverse developmental outcomes over the long term, including other factors that predict delinquency such as school failure, aggression, and inability to develop healthy peer relationship. [115] Although a review of intervention for maltreatment is beyond the scope of this article, a few points are worth highlighting. First, social workers need to be aware of the possibility that antisocial and delinquent adolescents may have been maltreated , and they should routinely assess for a history of or current maltreatment. Second, one should determine whether maltreatment preceded antisocial behavior or is, at least in family-based intervention to interrupt cycles of aggression is appropriate. If, however, maltreatment is ongoing and represents a longstanding pattern of parental abuse or neglect, the focus of behavior management may need to be shifted to the parents via mandated reporting and child protective services. Victimized youth may need evaluation and treatment to address health and mental health consequences of their victimization. [117] Serious, long-standing maltreatment also raises questions about the capacity of parents to be appropriate rehabilitative agents for their children; foster care or residential care may be more appropriate.
Preventive efforts should target at-risk infants and their caregivers in orders to reduce neglectful and abusive conditions and foster secure attachment to family members. Additional early interventions for at-risk families, such as intensive family preservation that provides family support and helps parents reduce or cope with stress, may reduce maltreatment risk.

Delinquency and Antisocial （English)目次に戻る

次のページへ進む