Oppositional toddlers learn quickly that their negative behavior will elicit reactions and attention from their parents. They also learn to model their parents negative behavior, and react to attacks with counterattacks. Perhaps without realizing it, parents foster the behavior in their children, and the children become exceedingly noncompliant to other authority figures. The two major types of intervention for oppositional children include traditional individual psychotherapy and behavior management. However, researchers contend that traditional psychotherapy is not enough to produce changes in such children, and that modification of the natural environment is crucial.
Parent training uses behavior modification to reeducate parents.
Parents learn to attend to their children, to give rewards, to ignore inappropriate behavior, to give commands in an appropriate manner, and to use punishment more effectively. It is not surprising that the highest success rates are with stable families in which the father as well as the mother are involved in the training, or where the father supports the mother for engaging actively in the program. Sadly, though, studies with oppositional children have shown that in many cases, training parents to manage the child is not enough. In addition, the rate of parent dropout and refusal of follow-up are high. It has been suggested that developing and instituting a family therapy approach can be more effective in changing deviant child behavior.