Behavioral therapies for children and adolescents

How can you define behavior therapy?

Behavioral therapies for children and adolescents vary widely, but they all focus primarily on how some problematic thoughts or negative behaviors may unknowingly or unintentionally get “rewarded” within a young person’s environment. These rewards or reinforcements often contribute to an increase in the frequency of these undesirable thoughts and behaviors.

Behavior therapies can be applied to a wide range of psychological symptoms among adolescents and children.

What are the main elements of behavior therapy?

Behavior therapy is based on the simple concept of positive reinforcement for desired behaviors, consequences or planned ignoring for undesired behaviors.

In behavior therapy, parents and children learn to promote desirable behaviors and reduce unwanted behaviors.

Although behavioral therapies can vary substantially from disorder to disorder, a common thread is that behavioral therapists encourage children and adolescents to try new behaviors, reward desired behaviors, and to allow unwanted behaviors to “extinguish” (that is, ignore unwanted behaviors).

How it works for children?

Some children and families will benefit from referral to a child psychologist..trained in general behavioral techniques. Some children by nature of their characteristics such as personality, tolerance of frustration, willingness to comply with parental requests are simply more challenging to parents.

One common trap that families fall into is unintentionally rewarding the wrong behavior. Behavioral therapists seek to understand such links between behaviors, rewards, and learning, and to help youth and parents shape their own behaviors to meet individual and family goals.

What are the types of behavioral interventions?

Behavioral Classroom Management

Behavioral classroom management is a type of evidence-based therapy designed to support students’ positive behaviors in the classroom, while preventing negative behaviors, and increasing student academic engagement. In this type of therapy, the child’s teacher participates in delivering the treatment. Behavioral classroom management has received substantial empirical support as an effective therapy in the treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Behavioral Peer Interventions

Behavioral peer interventions involve one or more of a student’s peers providing assistance to the child with behavioral problems. A teacher will train a child’s peers to reinforce the child’s positive behaviors and academic performance with social and academic support strategies. This kind of therapy is often used in the school setting and has been shown to provide many benefits to academic, social, and interpersonal development.

Participation has also shown to be a positive influence for the peer assistant as well, because it reinforces a sense of responsibility and constructive behavioral changes. Behavioral peer interventions have been proven by science to be effective in treating ADHD.

Behavioral Parent Training

Behavioral parent training was developed to teach parents how to reinforce desirable behaviors in their children, discourage unwanted behaviors, and improve parent-child interactions. In this form of therapy, the parents play a significant role in treating their children’s behavior problems. During the therapy sessions, parents learn how to carefully observe their children’s behaviors at home and are taught skills to reward their children’s positive behaviors by using praise, positive attention, and rewards. They are also taught to use rule-setting, time-out, and ignoring to discourage bad behaviors.

Behavioral parent therapy has received substantial empirical support to be effective in reducing behavior problems – especially for children with ADHD.

Combined Behavioral Management Interventions

Research has found that combining forms of behavioral classroom management, behavioral parent training, and/or behavioral peer interventions are well-established and effective for treating ADHD.

Modeling

Modeling is a form of therapy in which a therapist demonstrates a non-fearful response to a negative situation in order to promote imitation in the child or adolescent. It has been proven to be effective in treating anxiety in children and adolescents.