Behavioral therapies and their types

Behavioral therapies for children and adolescents vary widely, but they all focus primarily on how some problematic thoughts or negative behaviors may unknowingly or unintentionally get “rewarded” within a young person’s environment. These rewards or reinforcements often contribute to an increase in the frequency of these undesirable thoughts and behaviors. Behavior therapies can be applied to a wide range of psychological symptoms among adolescents and children.

Types of Behavioral Therapies

Behavioral Classroom Management:

Behavioral classroom management is a type of evidence-based therapy designed to support students’ positive behaviors in the classroom, while preventing negative behaviors, and increasing student academic engagement. In this type of therapy, the child’s teacher participates in delivering the treatment.

Behavioral Peer Interventions:

Behavioral peer interventions involve one or more of a student’s peers providing assistance to the child with behavioral problems. A teacher will train a child’s peers to reinforce the child’s positive behaviors and academic performance with social and academic support strategies. This kind of therapy is often used in the school setting and has been shown to provide many benefits to academic, social, and interpersonal development.

There are a variety of peer-based behavioral interventions, including:

• Peer modeling
• Peer initiation training
• Classroom-wide tutoring

Behavioral Parent Training:

Behavioral parent training was developed to teach parents how to reinforce desirable behaviors in their children, discourage unwanted behaviors, and improve parent-child interactions. In this form of therapy, the parents play a significant role in treating their children’s behavior problems. During the therapy sessions, parents learn how to carefully observe their children’s behaviors at home and are taught skills to reward their children’s positive behaviors by using praise, positive attention, and rewards. They are also taught to use rule-setting, time-out, and ignoring to discourage bad behaviors.

Combined Behavioral Management Interventions:

Research has found that combining forms of behavioral classroom management, behavioral parent training, and/or behavioral peer interventions are well-established and effective for treating ADHD.

Modeling:

Modeling is a form of therapy in which a therapist demonstrates a non-fearful response to a negative situation in order to promote imitation in the child or adolescent. It has been proven to be effective in treating anxiety in children and adolescents

link: https://effectivechildtherapy.org/therapies/what-is-behavior-therapy/