Parent Management Training: Treatment for Oppositional, Aggressive, and Antisocial Behavior in Children and Adolescents

Good read for those interested in PMT or clinicians

Parent Management Training is a very helpful book not only for someone that may be training in the field of child Psychology or Therapy. It's helpful also for a parent who may like to delve deeper into understanding how it works and the methodology behind the techniques.

Explains how to use techniques from behavioral psychology to overcome oppositional behavior. I found it to be helpful as a clinician for use with younger clients (pre-adolescent). It would be way over a parent's head, though. Read "The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child" instead if you are a parent.

I absolutely love this book. It’s perfect for beginner therapists. I use it as more of a guide and don’t follow it verbatim as I also work with teens and some of the material is geared toward young children. The beginning of the book does a great job of presenting the basis for the models and the second half is a wonderful step by step guide to treatment. The methods are evidence based and effective and the downloadable handouts are excellent.

For a therapist who enjoys working with children with disruptive behavior, this is a good resource to go along with PMT training.

Kazdin's method is well researched and empirically supported (along with Barkley and Forehand). This manualized program is generally highly effective, but demands more frequent visits with the professional implementing it. It is a more intensive program than some others, but is often effective in reducing problematic patterns of behavior. All such programs demand the professional develop skill in effectively getting parents to change their behaviors as well, which is arguably the greatest challenge in this kind of work.

I am impressed with Kazdin's manual and have put it to great use in my counseling practice. I have read Kazdin's book on defiant kids and found both the book and the DVD to be helpful for my parents to read as well. Barkley's clinical manual on Defiant Teens is even more helpful to me, but this program provides a great deal of information that is critical in working with parents of defiant teens.

I am attempting to use this book in conjunction with Problem-Solving Therapy to treat ODD teens and preteens. Using these two approaches together is the only highly-rated evidence-based programs I could find for treating ODD that is suitable to a private practice setting. Using the book is quite frustrating though. The writing is dense and tightly compacted making it difficult to read and refer to. The instructions are often confusing, especially given that the worksheets required to use in each session are not included in the book. In trying to find them I even wrote to the author for assistance, but there was no response. I continued to spend a great deal of time searching for them online and finally did locate them. I would say this is probably an excellent program but it sure is a challenge to push through this huge tomb and come out with a practical and simple enough way to introduce it to parents. Also parents are resistant to this drawn out positive approach to their teen's behavior. They face such a variety of destructive, complex and serious problems that can all occur within a day and simply must be addressed at the time they occur. They desperately need to know what to do with this variety of daily emergencies they can't ignored (i.e. pulling a knife, screaming for hours, self-harm, slugging siblings, refusing to go to school). Observation, points, calm reprimands and positive reinforcement don’t apply at these times. The parents are usually working by necessity, too, so this approach is very time-consuming to apply effectively in their typical already stressful and exhausting day. So far, though, they are at least giving it a try and if they can stick with it perhaps eventually they will see results before these children end up in juvenile hall.