Parental Education falls into the Ecosystem Approaches due to its involvement of the child’s family system, as an agent of change on the child’s EBD. This technique emphasises the importance of the parents' learning as much about their EBD child’s perspective as they can in order to fully comprehend and help the child. This also helps parents to understand they are not necessarily guilty partners in the child's disorder. This is the second most often used form of treatment for children with ADHD, and has given rise to the recognition that increased parental competence has a positive effect on all of children's pro-social behaviour.

The first step is to assist the parents in understanding the primary and secondary causes of the child behavioural problem (this can involve recognition of the parental home or upbringing style as a influencing factor)

The second step of the process is to assist parents in making the distinction between inappropriate behaviour that results from the child’s incompetence (or lack of skills) and that which results from non-compliance. If the former is demonstrated then the correct approach involves education and social skill building, while the latter may require some other form of motivation (e.g. token reward or punishment). It is essential that the parents be able to distinguish between these two occurrences, numerous examples tied specifically to the child in question should be given(possibly taken from the Social Skills Check List). If this differentiation is not correctly established the child can rapidly become frustrated with any attempts to co-operate. The parents must not have unrealistic expectations of their child. An overtly rigid parent can quickly reinforce a pattern of problematic behaviour, due to placing excessive demands on the child.

Once parents know how to distinguish between the child’s behaviour, they are taught the correct direction in which to encourage their child’s behaviour. For example, a child with their feet on a table or desk could be told “take your feet off that”, this may sound positive, however the child has only been instructed where not to place their feet (e.g. the table), not where to place them. This leaves a whole range of behaviours open to the child, such as now placing their feet on a chair or settee. The correct response would have been “keep your feet off the furniture and on the ground”, thus leaving little room for misinterpretation.

The parents are then taught techniques usually based on learning theory principles, for manipulating the child's environment in an organised manner, to reduce the incidence of non-compliant behaviour and increase the incidence of compliant behaviour of the child. The following techniques are used;

This education can come from the school, clinic or a parental support group (e.g. LADDER). The studies (Phillips & Ray, 1980; Gittelman-Kleim, Abikoff, Pollack, Kein, Katz & Mattes, 1980) suggest these programs give short-term positive results, but fail in the long-term to manage the behaviour of an EBD child. This, Barkley (1981) feels, is due to the EBD child's behaviour being of greater influence on the parents, than the parents behaviour on the child

Family Therapy Approaches

Clinical applications of ecosystems theory were pioneered by family therapist such as Selvini-Palazzoli et al (1973), Minuchin (1974) and de Shazer (1982, 1985). All though widely used in the US schools, family therapy in educational applications is still extremely new in the UK.

However Dowling & Osborne (1985) have developed, what they termed, a “joint-systems” approach, considering the wider aspects of the child’s ecosystem. They advocated the use of family therapists as consultants to the school as well as family system, were appropriate. Dowling & Taylor (1989) give the example of an “outreach” service which make a group of family therapists regularly available, by basing themselves on the school premises. There has been considerable support for the training of British Educational Psychologists in family therapy techniques, as a means of bringing families and schools into greater harmony. In the USA there has been success using such approaches with EBD children who: swear and interrupt teachers (Mandel et al, 1975); are aggressive towards other pupils (Brown, 1986). This approach has also been used to counteract fighting, truant, and suffer from suicidal depression (Williams & Lindquist, 1989), as well as school phobia/refusal.

“Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties: Theory to Practice”, Cooper, P., Smith, C. J. and Upton, G. (1994), London, Routledge.

Chazan, M., Lainf, A. F. and Davies, D. (1994), London, Famer Press.

“See Me After School: understanding and Helping Children with EBD”, Lennox, D. (1991), London, David Fulton Publisher Ltd.

“The clinic goes to school: lessons learnt”, in Maladjustment and Therapeutic Education, Volume 7, Issue 1, pages 24-29.