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The abused child is often described as being difficult to manage and delayed in several areas of psychosocial development in comparison with normal children. Although recent studies have attended to the developmental consequences of abuse, little consensus has been reached regarding the extent and nature of behavior problems among these children. The present study investigated the problem behaviors of a group of school-aged abused children in comparison with a sample of nonabused children from a child welfare agency and a sample of nonabused children in the community. Parental report of behavioral strengths and weaknesses was examined by administering the Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist to selected families from a child welfare agency and from the community. The results concur with those of previous reports, that abused children display a significantly greater number of behavior problems and fewer social competencies than normals. In addition, the behavior patterns of abused children closely resembled the range of behavior problems shown by children from distressed families in which abuse was not present. The implications of these results for understanding and helping abused children and their parents are discussed.Early clinical reports of abused children noted a greater rate of child abuse among children with physical and general developmental deviations than among normal comparison children (Elmer & Gregg, 1967;Gil, 1968;Johnson & Morse, 1968). For example, premature and low-birth-weight children are believed to be especially at risk for abuse due, in part, to the extra childrearing burden placed on parents by children with special needs (Elmer & Gregg, 1967;Skinner & Castle, 1969). These findings led investigators to reconceptualize child abusive behavior in terms of aversive interactions between parents and children, rather than adult psychopathology alone (

Stimulus shaping appears to be a highly successful way to teach discrimination skills. In stimulus shaping, the topographical configuration of the stimuli is gradually changed over trials so that discrimination is at first easy, and then gradually more difficult. Stimulus shaping procedures might also be effective for training visual-motor tasks. Two experiments were conducted to assess the relative effectiveness of stimulus shaping and "traditional" prompting procedures. Pegboard skills were trained in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2 a self-care skill was trained, in which children learned to hang a toothbrush or a washdoth on a specific hook. Six low-functioning retarded children were studied in each experiment, using a within-subject alternating treatments design. Each participant received concurrent training on two related tasks, using stimulus shaping for one and a standard prompting procedure for the other. Training with the stimulus shaping procedure required less training time to criterion, always resulted in fewer errors, always required fewer and less intrusive therapist's prompts, and always resulted in greater density of reinforcement. These results demonstrate the value of stimulus shaping strategies for training visual-motor skills.

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