User:Wdwiki/Editing Warwick Dyer's Behaviour Method

Warwick Dyer's behavour method, documented in his book Mercury’s Child, is based on the premise that children's "bad" behaviour is caused by an imbalance in the interactions with their parents.

(“Hvem Bestemmer?” Dyer, W. (2008). Akademisk Forlag (Denmark)  ISBN 978-87-500-3980-8 in Danish and "Mercury's Child" Dyer, W. (2007).  Booklocker.inc. ISBN 978-1-60145-262-7. in English)

He says that professionals use four main theoretical approaches and their derivatives to change behaviour, they are:

1. Behavioural: Problems due to maladaptive learning; uses rewards and punishments

2. Person-centred: Problems due to child’s self-concept; aims to redress discrepancies  between the child’s actual and ideal self

3. Cognitive behavioural: Problems due to maladaptive thinking; uses training for erroneous or unrealistic thinking

4. Psychodynamic: Problems due to unresolved unconscious conflicts; helps child to gain insight and increase ego strength

But postulates a fifth approach

5. Interactive behavioural:

The scope of interactive behavioural approach, he days, is limited to children and adolescence and those in dependent positions. It trains parents and parent-figures how to train their charges. The interactive behavioural approach represents a tangential shift in focus from all the existing approaches. Unlike all of the other approaches, with the exception, perhaps, of the family therapies, it does not see “bad behaviour” as the child’s problem at all, but rather an interactional problem between child and parent, which the child is incapable of changing. It therefore works, unlike even the family therapies, exclusively through parents, through their perception of what is happening, and their responses. It sees the training of parents in the use of effective interactive techniques as crucial even when they have to deal with the most serious conditions and disorders.

He says that if inappropriate behaviour has, in fact, been frozen in place by parental response then any approach that works directly with the child is seriously handicapped. Recognising for the first time that “bad behaviour” is created and maintained by parental response represents the new approach’s major asset. Here are some other advantages.

1. It has the advantage, like the straight behavioural approach of not having to accommodate itself to the child’s conceptual or emotional development however young the child might be.

2. The training works with what the parents are already doing since all parents already use an intuitive behavioural approach especially when they give a reward or a punishment.

3. As the child usually does not know there is a trainer/therapist they are not required to accept them or build a relationship with them. With other approaches  accomplishing acceptance of the therapist is crucial and can be extremely time consuming and may never be achieved.*

4. Enables the parents to remain as the “agents of change”, Parents can proceed without the loss of leadership that occurs when the child is interacting with a therapist from outside the home.

5. One of the main presenting problems and therefore a main indicator of success for all the approaches concerns the child’s acceptance of, and normal response to, reasonable parental guidance/authority. An approach that looks directly at these interactions therefore, has obvious benefits.

6. It does not rely on the therapist talking directly to the child and therefore avoids the problem of rewarding the “bad behaviour” with attention or the child being made to feel “special”. Avoids any increase in the child’s perception of a negative label.**

He says that the Interactive Behavioural approach also recognises the importance of self-concept to the changes that parents want to achieve It sees as crucial the child’s perception of self that is derived from parents’ statements and actions. It sees the frustrations cased by the ineffectiveness of sanctions (punishments) as leading to the use of “interpersonal sanctions” which negatively affect the child’s self esteem. It trains parents to maintain a positive approach and reduce discrepancies between how the child would like to view him or herself and the view they see reflected from their parents.

The training of maladaptive; erroneous or unrealistic thinking

Dyer says that parents often believe that it is their child’s thinking that is the problem. They engaged in continuous attempts to change what their children appear to think. Interactive Behavioural approach sees these attempts as adding to the problems, and encourages parents to use clear strategies to avoid this trap. It does not view the apparent maladaptive, erroneous, or unrealistic thinking/processing of badly behaved children as a problem associated with lack of logical thinking at all, but rather one associated with the need to “win”. The strength of this need, reciprocated and modelled by the parent, gives the child more than enough incentive to, apparently, suspend logical thinking. Rather than a lack of logical thinking ability ‘badly’ behaved children have an overdeveloped, parent-maintained, need to win, perpetuated by a lack of calm training to accept consequences. Children do what works. The ‘Interactive’ behaviour model shows that the unhelpful or unrealistic ways that children appear to think can quickly changed. This is achieved by eliminating the rewards that the child always gains from the dogmatic adherence to non-logical positions.

Not a new behaviour disorder

The phrase “Interactive Behaviour Imbalance” was first used by Warwick Dyer some years ago and is not intended to describe another behaviour disorder but rather the child’s unwanted normal response to inadequate and flawed parental training. The key word “Interactive” is included to make it impossible for parents or professionals to see “bad behaviour” as a problem that the child has. This term is intended to make it clear that remedial work by professionals needs to be centred on the interactions between parent and child and that work centred only on the child is either unnecessarily protracted or futile.

He says that the word “Imbalance” is intended to describe the common counter-productive ways parents handle inappropriate behaviour in the home and the resulting predictable group of inappropriate behaviours the child then enacts. This group of behaviours usually occur together (see chapter three) and are maintained only if the lack of precision in analysis and response continues. Training that is imprecise and combative develops and gratifies the child’s competitive needs. The child becomes increasingly concerned with their success in getting their own way and avoiding any practical consequence, to this end they refuse to accept reasonable propositions and logical connections. The child’s strives to make all the decisions themselves. Parents’ authority and leadership is undermined as they inadvertently reward the very behaviour that they want to stop. This is true of the child’s main tactic, over-reaction and anger and the child becomes increasingly insecure and badly behaved.

“Interactive Behaviour Imbalance” in Dyer's view, does not describe a behaviour disorder but rather an imbalance between the parent / child roles and responses within the family. The biggest indictment of many interventions from the existing behaviour approaches is that they do not first look to see if the “problem” behaviour is a natural response to parental interactions. They are all too often prepared to believe that it is possible for the child to have a behaviour problem on their own. We aim to show here that "bad” behaviour is always an interaction problem and this remains true even when the predisposition to behave differently is caused by a major behaviour disorder.