Abstract
Mothers of 5- to 7-yr.-old children with behavior problems were observed while managing the behavior of their own child and a matched control child in three laboratory tasks. The results indicated that the children were less compliant and exhibited more attention-seeking behavior with their own mothers. Moreover, mothers relied more frequently on aversive control procedures with their own children and more often rewarded their undesirable behaviors than those of the other children. Implications suggest that the systems-maintaining aspects of the mother-child relationship can progressively exacerbate both deviant behaviors of children and ineffective behaviors of parents and that effective retraining of parents might well begin with the temporary “swapping” of poorly behaved children.
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