Youth violence is a troubling problem in education
and a critical societal problem. Chronic aggressive behavior is a major
reason for referral to special education. Conduct disorders are linked to
academic failure, school drop-out, and juvenile crime. Kenneth Dodge and
Ann Kaiser are working on preventing conduct disorder by starting early
- before children enter school - and by working with parents and teachers
in schools and community child care centers.
Dodge, professor of psychology and director of the John F. Kennedy Center's
Institute on Development and Psychopathology, said that when he first began
working with troubled youth, he accidentally jostled a young man - who reacted
with fists raised, ready to fight. Why did he interpret as hostile what
another youth would have understood as unintentional? This question is at
the foundation of Dodge's commitment to understanding the factors involved
in the development of aggressive behavior - an understanding essential for
effective prevention.
Based on Dodge's research and work done elsewhere, factors in the development
of chronic aggressive behavior problems are now clear: inconsistent and
overly harsh parenting and poor parent-child relationships; inability of
children to understand others' emotions and to solve problems; academic
failure, beginning with failure to learn to read and perform adequately
as early as first-grade and second-grade; and being socially rejected by
other children - unable to get along in a group and to form friendships.
This knowledge led Dodge and his colleagues to design a long-term prevention
effort that intervenes in all of these psychological processes. Funded by
the National Institute of Mental Health, FAST Track is located at four national
sites -Nashville, Durham, N.C.; Seattle; and rural Pennsylvania.
In total, 12,000 children entering kindergarten were screened. Of these,
900 children who were most at risk for developing aggressive behavior were
identified; half receive the FAST Track program and half (the comparison
group) receive whatever their local schools or communities provide.
The intervention began as children entered first-grade; the oldest group
is now in eighth-grade, with other groups now in fifth-grade and fourth-grade.
Intervention will continue into high school and follow-up with all 900 children
is planned through age 18.
Intervention targets each of the major risk factors, Dodge said. FAST Track
components include training parents in communication and discipline, teaching
children social and problem solving skills, academic tutoring, enhancing
peer relations, and consulting with classroom teachers.
"We have been successful in implementing the intervention," Dodge
said, "in itself a complicated matter. The parents of these high-risk
children are often poor. Many are single mothers with several children.
There is family disorganization, stress, and even violence."
To help families take part, researchers have provided transportation, child
care for siblings, and paid parents for their time. Dodge said that 97 percent
of families asked to be in the project agreed, and that about 75 percent
of the parents take part, to some degree, in family components.
"We've also been successful in achieving changes," Dodge said.
"Parents in the intervention group are parenting more effectively,
as directly observed and rated by our home visitors and on measures of parenting
skills. We've been successful in teaching the children social skills; tests
of social-cognitive skills show that the intervention group is performing
better than the comparison group. We've been successful in improving peer
relations; children in the intervention group are better liked and less
disliked by their peers than the children in the comparison group. And we've
been successful in reducing children's aggressive behavior on the playground,
as rated by direct observers."
Only after long-term follow-up will Dodge and his colleagues know whether
they have been successful in achieving the ultimate aims of reducing school
dropout, juvenile court adjudication, and commission of violent crimes.
"The longest term outcome we have so far is reduction of placement
into special education," Dodge said. "Even though our intervention
is expensive, we hope to be successful at saving costs such as special education,
psychiatric hospitalization, and juvenile court adjudication." A cost-benefit
analysis is planned.
Ann Kaiser, professor and chair of special education and director of the
Kennedy Center's Institute on Prevention, Early Intervention, and Families,
is in the initial stages of an early intervention program for preschoolers
to prevent conduct disorders, which has grown out of her research with young
children with language delays.
"As we worked with kids and families over the years," Kaiser said,
"it's clear that parent-child communication and parent management of
child behavior as well as child communication and child behavior are closely
related. Parents who are skilled in talking to their children and supporting
their children's development are also usually skilled in managing child
behavior."
A child learns to control the environment, to communicate needs and wants.
Kaiser said, "You either act with language or you act without language.
Kids who have lots of language tend to use it. Kids who don't use other
means, like hitting or whining.
"Children with language problems are at relatively greater risk for
behavior problems than children without language delays," Kaiser said.
A number of things may be involved, for example, a child's physiology or
health, but "parent-child interaction is one of the most powerful factors
influencing both language and prosocial behavior development," Kaiser
said. "We've worked with parents all these years and have trained parents
to teach communication skills to their children with language delays. So
now we're looking at interactions between parents and children when they
live in a high-risk environment."
The immediate environment includes a parent's mental health, stressors,
and education; social support; and that family's experiences. "These
factors influence the way parents behave to children, the way children behave
to parents, and their histories of interaction over time," Kaiser said.
This immediate environment occurs in the context of the larger stressful
environment of poverty, where the ratios of adults to children are relatively
large, where employment may be an issue, where learning materials may be
sparse, where crowding and poor housing and exposure to violence are common-place.
"The larger environment is not supportive of the parent, so both parent
and child are at increased risk for difficulty in their interactions,"
Kaiser said. The immediate and larger environment affects how the parent
behaves with a child - responsiveness, offering language routines, being
able to model and expand child language. And a child comes into the context
with individual genetic traits and abilities that also affect interactions
and behavior."
To predict whether preschool children are at risk for problem behavior,
Kaiser and her colleagues are considering a variety of factors. Does the
family live in an impoverished, high-stress environment? Does a parent have
poor skills in child communication and behavior management and monitoring?
Does a child already show some pattern of limited communication skills?
At age two or three, does a child show elevated levels of aggression and
noncompliance?
Kid Talk, a five-year project funded by the National Institute of Mental
Health, has three aims: to identify preschool children at high risk for
conduct disorders, to implement a multi-component intervention, and to follow
children from age three into kindergarten to determine the intervention's
effect on communication and behavior.
"Our intervention has three pieces," Kaiser said. "Train
parents to communicate and support positive behavior. Work directly with
children in their child care settings. And teach children how to communicate
with their peers."
Families also will be followed and supported, with additional training,
consultation, and referral for other services, through a child's entry into
kindergarten. "We think we're a really powerful intervention,"
Kaiser said.
The intervention phase will last for three years, with the first year being
especially intensive.
In the project, 900 preschool children will be screened and 180 children
and families who are most at risk will be selected for the intervention;
to date, 250 preschool children have been screened. Of the 250 preschoolers
screened, about 12 percent have both language and behavior problems; another
10 percent have low language; and another 6 percent have behavior problems.
That is, by age three, about 25 percent of the children are at high risk
for language or behavior problems, or both.
Kid Talk involved 13 child-care centers located in low-income neighborhoods
in Nashville. The average language score for the entire group is about 15.4
points below normal, Kaiser said. "This means that the whole population
of children, by the tests we're using - and there are certainly qualifications
about the tests - are doing less well in their language development at age
three" than are preschool children from families and neighborhoods
with higher socioeconomic status.
Of the 250 preschoolers screened so far, in tests of behavior, about 15
percent have scores on aggressive behavior that are in the clinical or near
clinical range; in a typical sample, about 5 percent would be expected.
"So as we hypothesized, these preschool children from poverty neighborhoods
are more at risk for language problems and behavior problems than the general
population," Kaiser said.
Intervention is just beginning with the first group of preschool children
and their parents.
Kaiser is optimistic. "These children are so smart and so talented
and so unlikely to realize that. If we can do this intervention, we can
help make differences in people's lives."
Of the cost of intervention programs, Kaiser said, "How much is a child
worth? I think these children are worth a whole lot. I think these families
are worth a whole lot. I don't know how we get our policy makers, our society,
to say: 'It is too costly to let these children go, too costly to let them
drop out of school, too costly to incarcerate them. Too costly to lose them.'
"
Jan Rosemergy
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Document updated June 11, 1997