Practice Elements: Skill Building

Skills building intervention that aims to identify a skill that the child wants to develop, set a goal involving the talent or skill he/she wants to develop, and start practicing mastering small steps needed until each goal is achieved.

Practice Elements: Response Cost

Skills building intervention to provide the caregiver with a convenient, systematic, immediate, and powerful consequence for misbehavior. The more frequent the behavior, the more caregiver attention and monitoring will need to occur, and child’s developmental stage: younger children or children with developmental delays will require simpler penalty programs with fewer target behaviors than will older children.

Practice Elements: Self-Monitoring

Skills building intervention that aims to identify target behavior or emotion to monitor, to develop a rating scale to increase accuracy of the observations, and to create a recording procedure.

Practice Elements: Problem Solving

Skills building intervention that aims to provide children with a systematic way to negotiate problems and to consider alternative solutions to situations. Familiarize the child with this problem-solving process by starting with your own problem and allow the child to help you in working through the problem solving steps.

Practice Elements: Relaxation

Skills building intervention that aims to present the idea that staying calm and relaxing is a good way to affect the way we feel, to demonstrate what relaxation feels like to children who have difficulty relaxing, and to increase a child’s awareness about his or her own tension so that relaxation skills can be applied at
the proper time.

Practice Elements: Praise

Skills building intervention that aims to inform the caregiver about the value of praise, to provide the caregiver with strategies to increase the child’s appropriate behavior, and to encourage participation in treatment.

Practice Elements: Monitoring

Skills building intervention that aims to identify target behaviors to monitor, to develop a rating scale to increase the accuracy of observation, and to create a recording procedure. Monitoring is gathering information about the child’s behavior to identify area of concern and provide information about how treatment is going.

Practice Elements: Modeling

Skills building intervention that aims to promote rapid acquisition of a new skill (e.g., approaching a feared object, having a conversation) and to provide an opportunity for a caregiver to demonstrate the skill or to cue the child to use the skill in appropriate situations.

Practice Elements: Goal Setting

Skills building intervention that aims to provide a rationale for using a goal setting framework, to identify goals that are important to the child and family, and to establish a realistic, achievable progression of steps towards desired goals.