So far, we have discussed many behavioral-based strategies that you can use at home and in other settings. For example, behavior-specific praise, shaping, and token economy. These strategies are helpful when you are with your child. However, what if your child is at school and the teacher reports that the child displays unwanted behavior such as disrupting in class, problems with transitions from one task to another? What can you do when you are not around? Teachers are usually extremely busy and have many children in one class to monitor and many lessons to plan. Thus, it is recommended not to rely on the teachers solely. Home-based reinforcement program (HBRP) could be beneficial.

HBRP is a method for effective behavior change in which your child’s behavior in school is reported to his or her parents who then reward the behavior. Here are the steps for an HBRP:

Be specific with the behavior: What is the behavior that the teacher and you are concern about in school? When defining the behavior make sure to be specific and both you and the teacher have the same definition in terms of what the behavior might look like.

Creating a system: There should be a system set up for the teacher to use when measuring your child’s behavior. Such as a Likert scale of 0 to 2. 0 means there is no change and unwanted behavior is still there and 2 means there is a drastic change in behavior and great improvement is observed by the teacher. At the end of the day, an index card with a point will be handed to you indicating how many points your child earned on that day.

Reward program or token economy: In a separate blog post we discussed the token economy. Similarly, your child earns the points based on the points that she received on that day in exchange for the predetermined rewards. Also, make sure there are various small and big rewards so your child can get smaller rewards immediately or save up tokens for bigger rewards.

To ensure that HBRP will be successful in changing unwanted behavior.

1. Working with the teacher to focus on one behavior at a time.
2. Your reactions to your child’s score are important to the success of the program.
   1. Make sure to celebrate small improvement, one of the pitfalls for the program is demanding perfection.
   2. When score is
      • 0 – your response should be calm and do not complain or ask what happened because it might hinder the willingness of the child to participate in the program. For example, you can say “You did not get any points today but you can try again tomorrow.”
      • 1 – Praise the slight improvement.
      • 2 – Praise the perfect score enthusiastically.

HBRP is a useful strategy to address behavior issues in school and other settings. Most teachers are more than willing to participate as it does not demand a lot of effort and also helps change unwanted behavior.

For next week, we will discuss a behavioral strategy used for sleep problems with children called “bedtime pass”.