Parent—child transactions provide an important social context for the development of adaptive and problem behaviors in young children with autism.Teaching parents to develop alternative transactional pathways often leads to positive behavioral patterns in their children.We taught three parents the philosophy and practice of mindfulness in a 12-week course and assessed the outcome of the training on their children's behavior. In addition, the mothers rated satisfaction with their parenting skills and interactions with their children. Results showed that the mothers' mindful parenting decreased their children's aggression, noncompliance, and self-injury and increased the mothers' satisfaction with their parenting skills and interactions with their children.We speculated on the possible reasons for the efficacy of mindful parenting in decreasing the children's problem behaviors without the application of specific, programmed contingencies for the children's behavior.
Adolescents with conduct disorder frequently engage in aggressive and disruptive behaviors. Often these behaviors are controlled or managed through behavioral or other psychosocial interventions. However, such interventions do not always ensure lasting changes in an adolescent's response repertoire so that he or she does not engage in aggression when exposed to the same situations that gave rise to the behavior previously. Mindfulness training provides a treatment option that helps an individual focus and attend to conditions that give rise to maladaptive behavior.Using a multiple baseline design,we assessed the effectiveness of a mindfulness training procedure in modulating the aggressive behavior of three adolescents who were at risk of expulsion from school because of this behavior. The adolescents were able to learn the mindfulness procedure successfully and use it in situations that previously occasioned aggressive behavior.This led to large decreases in the aggression of all three individuals. Follow-up data showed that the adolescents were able to keep their aggressive behavior at socially acceptable levels in school through to graduation. Maladaptive behaviors, other than aggression, that the adolescents chose not to modify, showed no consistent change during mindfulness training, practice, and follow-up.
Verbal and physical aggression are risk factors for community placement of individuals with serious and persistent mental illness. Depending on the motivations involved, treatment typically consists of psychotropic medications and psychosocial interventions, including contingency management procedures and anger management training. Effects of a mindfulness procedure, Meditation on the Soles of the Feet , were tested as a cognitive behavioral intervention for verbal and physical aggression in 3 individuals who had frequently been readmitted to an inpatient psychiatric hospital owing to their anger management problems. In a multiple baseline across subjects design, they were taught a simple meditation technique, requiring them to shift their attention and awareness from the anger-producing situation to the soles of their feet, a neutral point on their body. Their verbal and physical aggression decreased with mindfulness training; no physical aggression and very low rates of verbal aggression occurred during 4 years of follow-up in the community.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.