The Back Door to Behavior Regulation

Virtually every parent, teacher, or caregiver wants well-behaved kids.  Theories abound how to achieve that goal.  My experience as a therapist has taught me that a “one-size-fits-all” approach isn’t effective.  Every child has unique talents and needs, therefore every parenting approach has to be tailored or personalized by wise parents.  But general patterns point the parents in the right direction. 

The four approaches I start with in teaching parenting is:

1.   Behavioral (e.g. Thomas Phelan’s 1-2-3 Magic)

2.     Love and Logic (e.g. Foster and Cline)

3.     Screamfree Parenting (e.g. Hal Runkel)

4.     Attachment (e.g. Theraplay, DDP, or Circle of Security)

There are many other approaches, of course.  But these are good approaches to start with. 

But in this blog I want to focus on just two – behaviorism and attachment.  There’s an extensive literature on the issue and if you like dry, academic writing I can point you in the right direction – just email me at drkyleweir@gmail.com or kyle@roubicekandthacker.com .  I’ll email you my book chapter called “Playing for Keeps” that extensively reviews the literature debate between the two research approaches. But here, I want to simply express a view you won’t see in academia. 

Let’s start with an example.  If you take a class of thirty kids and try to behaviorally regulate them.  Behavioral approaches (names on the board, red-yellow-green lights, token economies, time-outs) will work on about 25 out of the 30 kids.  But for the remaining children, giving consequences for bad behavior will likely increase their bad behavior.  Why?  Because, presuming these children have attachment issues, the child views the punishment in relational terms rather than behavioral terms.  To my friends enamored with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, consider it this way: The child has a cognitive distortion where instead of applying the consequence to their behaviors, they apply it to the relationship.  So when the teacher gives the consequence for an attachment-disordered child’s behavior, the child doesn’t think, “I shouldn’t have done that” (like most kids would think); rather the child thinks, “My teacher hates me.  Well, I hate her, too, so I’ll just be even worse for her.”  The same is true for foster children.  I’ve heard them say things like, “My foster mom hates me, because she punished me.  I’m not gonna do what she says.”

So with attachment disordered children you can’t go in the “front door” (meaning using behavioral techniques) to regulate behavior.  While the behavioral approach works for most kids, it generally exacerbates the problem with attachment-disordered children.  That’s why we have to go through the “back door” to behavioral regulation.  The back door is a path that starts with building safe and secure attachments first, then helping to regulate emotions, and finally the child will self-regulate their own behaviors in an attachment-secure, emotionally-regulated context. 

That’s why I start using a special form of play therapy called Theraplay®. Theraplay is a non-coercive, attachment-savvy form of play therapy developed by Dr. Ann Jernberg in Chicago, IL in the late 1960s.  It focuses on improving the parent-child relationship with play emphasizing the four dimensions of attachment: Structure, Engagement, Nurture, and Challenge.  The therapist helps parents and children learn to play and interact in ways that build a safe secure attachment relationship and helps the child regulate their emotions.  (For a full description of Theraplay see Booth & Jernberg, 2010 or www.theraplay.org - a future blog will give more detail.)

It’s amazing to me but after 12 sessions or so, the children generally feel safe and secure in their family relationships, learn how to regulate their emotions, and then self-regulate their behavior.  In a clinical study we conducted we found that children showed statistically-significant improvement in overall behavioral functioning after 12-15 weeks of Theraplay sessions (see Weir et al., 2013). 

There are many other good non-coercive, attachment-savvy approaches (I also utilize Dan Hughes’ Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy), but Theraplay’s empirical basis is strong and grower more respected every year. 

I’ve done the scientific research to show that Theraplay works.  A study I published in Adoption Quarterly (Weir et al., 2013) about adoptive families we used Theraplay with found that parents improved in some aspects (communication and interpersonal roles).  But the largest, most significant finding was that Theraplay led to statistically significant improvement in overall emotional and behavior functioning.  So now I can tell parents starting out in Theraplay sessions with me, we know the science behind the treatment – “there’s a method to our madness” – so to speak.  Theraplay really works for families. My hope is that if you are struggling with your child, it will work for you.

Kyle N. Weir, PhD, LMFT, is a Professor of Marriage & Family Therapy at California State University – Fresno, a Therapist at Roubicek & Thacker, and author of Intimacy, Identity, and Ice Cream: Teaching Teens and Young Adults to Live the Law of Chastity.