Consultation Practices: Training Parents and Families

Parents and families interact with and address their children’s problem behavior on a daily basis, and often do so with a very limited amount of training, which may lead to poor treatment fidelity and treatment adherence when the behavior analytic services are discontinued. To increase parent/family fidelity and treatment adherence, our clinical teams maximally include parents/families throughout our assessment and treatment process. In this chapter, we discuss how we train parents and families on behavior analytic procedures conducted within our behavioral services for problem behavior displayed by children with and without disabilities. We emphasize the training procedures we use in our 90-minute outpatient clinic, Day Treatment service, and in-home service, with a focus on strategies we use to promote the parents/families generalization and maintenance of the treatment procedures for their children. We, then, discuss the benefits and limitations to training parents/families within each of these services, and conclude with recommendations for behavior analytic therapists.