Cooperation Coach Overview

What are the goals of this program?

We are going to work together to help you improve your child’s behavior. The best way to do this is to help you use firm expectation, rewards and consequences as expertly as possible. Changing what you do as a parent does not mean that your child’s misbehavior is your fault. Rather, we know that you are the most important person in your child’s life and so you can have the biggest influence on his or her behavior. Most of what you learn in this program will not be new to you. Instead, our job is to make sure that you are using these common parenting approaches like an expert and then support you as you make gradual changes. Using strategies like time-out and reward systems the way most parents do usually is not enough to help children cooperate and stay calm when they are dealing with behavioral and emotional problems. Instead, these kids need more structure, so you have to be expert in behavior management, at least for a while. Together we will work toward making you a behavior management expert.

What should I expect?

You can expect the following from our program:

Understanding. First, we will help you understand how behavior management strategies (firm expectations, rewards, and consequences) work and how to get the most benefit from these strategies. We will also help you understand common parenting actions that tend to keep misbehaviors happening and make behavior management strategies less effective.

Make a Plan. Our second goal is to help you make a first draft of a plan to improve your child’s behavior. This plan should include using behavior management strategies in a way that is different from what you have done before.

Arrange support over time.Learning and planning behavior management is the easier part of improving your child’s behavior. Putting the plan in place, making changes, and sticking with it in real life is much more difficult. Having someone that you can meet with regularly to review progress and help make necessary changes to your plan is an important part of improving your child’s behavior. You can expect to leave each appointment knowing the available options for who you can meet with and when for support implementing your plan

Improvement over time. It is reasonable to expect that if you consistently use the strategies that you will learn, over time your child will become more cooperative and have fewer emotional outbursts.

What do I need to do?

Ask questions.This program will not be helpful if it is not clear how what we talk about applies to your family.
Give it a try.The plans you make here will not be helpful if you don’t try them at home.
Stick with it.Change takes time and patience. Most research studies include at least 8 to 10 sessions over multiple months.
Keep coming back.We don’t expect the first draft of your plan to be the final answer. Keep coming back (to us or someone else) to review your progress and make changes until you see the improvements you need.

What am I going to learn?

During this program you will learn these three basic techniques for changing your child’s behavior, in roughly the following order:

Providing Clear Expectations: If we want our children to behave well, we need to make it clear to ourselves and to them what we expect them to do.

1. Define the problem misbehavior
2. Translate misbehaviors into opposite specific good behaviors
3. Communicate realistic expectations clearly

Encouraging Good Behavior:Every time your child misbehaves there is an opposite good behavior you would like to have seen instead. Since most children respond better to rewards than to punishment, we are going to learn two skills for increasing the likelihood that your child will engage in desirable behavior.

1. Build a strong relationship through increasing positive interactions
2. Praise good behavior
3. Use a structured reward system

Discouraging Misbehavior: When children misbehave, parents need to calmly and quickly enforce limits. We will learn skills for responding to misbehavior in a way that will make it less likely that your child will do it again.

1. Ignore misbehaviors done for your attention
2. Use consequences for breaking rules and refusing to cooperate
3. Deliver consequences quickly, calmly and consistently without repeating or arguing

Let’s get started!