Objective: Whether parents could be taught to use behavior-analytic child-management skills. Method: Eleven parents typically labeled as difficult to train participated in one of two experimental parent-training programs at childwelfare agencies within the city of Chicago. Four classes of desirable parenting skills were recorded by observers during parent-child interactions in diverse settings, and the data were analyzed in single-subject designs. Results: Training produced improvements in the parenting skills observed. Follow-up observations occurring up to 6 months after training revealed that the parents continued to use these skills, sometimes at levels better than during their training. Conclusions: Behavioral parent training is an effective strategy for teaching parents with deficient parenting skills. Recommendations for conducting parent training with this population are discussed.Behavioral parent training is an empirically oriented treatment method that teaches parents how to apply childmanagement strategies based on behavior-analytic principles. In theory, these skills are simple, and they should be easy to apply. Typically, parent training involves teaching parents to identify target child behaviors, and to respond to them contingently. Specifically, parents are likely to be taught how to reinforce, punish, correct errors, prompt, shape, chain, and appropriately instruct their child's behaviors. Two types of behavioral parent training programs are found in the literature: programs that teach these general parenting skills, and programs that teach parents how to ameliorate specific child behavior problems. Both kinds of programs address generalization of the newly taught parenting skills to the home environment and to novel child-behavior problems (Pinkston, Levitt, Green, Linsk, & Rzepnicki, 1982).In theory, parent training should be an efficient and cost-effective delivery system for parents and therapists because one therapist presumably can teach a group of parents how to use the child-management strategies in the same amount of time that the therapist can directly serve one child. Thus, many more children can be served when parents are trained as behavior-change agents, and treatment can be extended to settings that therapists cannot access. If that is true, behavioral parent training should be an effective method for helping parents change a wide variety of behavior problems in their children and one strategy for teaching parents with deficient parenting skills.Volumes of empirical evidence support the efficacy of behavioral parent training. Numerous books and review articles describe its successes. Dangel and Polster (1984), for example, described the development and conceptual foundations of numerous variants of behavioral parent training adapted for a multitude of target populations. Their book included a compilation of programs for managing child abuse and neglect, noncompliance, and children with special problems such as developmental disabilities and autism. They also presented the behavior...
