Tremblay – intervention

There were two main parts to the intervention. One was parent training, where we were going to the homes of the parents for every three weeks for a period of two years. We were doing a standard parent training intervention where we trained the parents to observe the behavior of their child; observe when they were behaving positively and reinforcing that positive behavior; observe when they were misbehaving and helping them learn to give proper responses to misbehavior. And also training them in sort of general problem resolution skills.  

At the same time we were going into the schools and we were getting these children once a week into a social skills training program. And that social skills training program involved being in a group of highly skilled boys that we had identified before. So we had approximately five or six highly skilled boys with two or three boys who had behavior problems so that the highly skilled boys were acting as models for these low performing boys. And we believe that this type of intervention managed to get the boys who tended to be rejected to learn the skills to be accepted by the boys who have less problems.