Integrating Parents' Views on Sibling Relationships to Tailor an Evidence‐based Parenting Intervention for Sibling Conflict

Parents play a crucial role in the development of their children's relationships with their siblings. Despite this, relatively few evidence‐based parenting programs exist that specifically offer parents the strategies and techniques they desire and require for managing their children's sibling relationships. One way of bridging this gap is to design a tailored parenting intervention for sibling relationships that incorporates the parent voice in various aspects of program design. The current study recruited a convenience sample of 409 Australian parents to complete an online survey relating to their views on difficult sibling behaviors and what, if any, help they desire in dealing with the issue. The majority of respondents were Caucasian, middle‐ to upper‐class mothers. Respondents predominantly attributed the causes of sibling conflict to their child's internal traits, but expressed strong desire for assistance with managing behavioral problems, especially when sibling relationships were marked by physical aggression. Respondents reported high levels of acceptability for positive, rather than punitive, parenting strategies and showed a clear preference for parenting interventions delivered in easy‐to‐access formats. The findings are interpreted in the context of guiding the development of a tailored parenting intervention for enhancing sibling relationships and reducing conflict.     

Forging a Collaborative Relationship Between the Black Church and the Counseling Profession

In the field of counseling, there has been a growing awareness of the important role the Black church plays in African American communities. Although counseling professionals have begun recognizing the influence the Black church has in the lives of African Americans, there seems to be little information on how counselors can collaborate with African American congregations to meet the mental health needs of African American clients. The authors examine how counselors can use the psychological and social strengths of the Black church. Strategies and implications for collaborating with this institution are also discussed.     

The <Emphasis Type="Italic">Community Supports for Wraparound Inventory</Emphasis>: An Assessment of the Implementation Context for Wraparound

The wraparound process has emerged as perhaps the most frequently implemented comprehensive approach for planning and providing individualized, community-based care for children and adolescents with serious mental health conditions. Providing comprehensive care through the wraparound process necessarily requires a high level of collaboration across organization and agency boundaries. This need for significant inter-agency or “system-level” collaboration creates a complex implementation environment for wraparound. It is therefore not surprising that creating and sustaining a hospitable implementation environment has proven to be extremely challenging. For the people who are responsible for managing the inter-organizational collaboration, it is not easy to evaluate the adequacy of local system-level support for wraparound and to see exactly what kinds of supports are lacking or where system-development efforts should focus. Furthermore, as system-development strategies are put into practice, it can be difficult to assess whether or not meaningful progress is occurring. The Community Supports for Wraparound Inventory (CSWI) was developed to respond to the need for an assessment of the extent to which a community has developed system-level capacity to implement wraparound. This article reports on a study that evaluated the reliability and validity of the CSWI for use in communities implementing wraparound. Findings indicate that the CSWI shows promise as a reliable, valid and useful tool.     

Shendu and Qingdu: Reading the Recovered Bamboo and Silk Manuscripts

The terms du (獨) and shendu (慎獨) frequently appear in transmitted texts, notably, among others, the Xunzi and Liji. Drawing reference from the poetry of “Shijiu” (鳲鳩) (Ode 152) and “Yanyan” (燕燕) (Ode 28) in the Book of Odes (詩經), the recovered texts of “Wuxing Commentary” (五行 說) and “Confucian Poetics” (孔子詩論) have provided new material for re-shaping our current understanding of the concepts of du and shendu. This study will briefly survey the semantic ranges of these terms within the exegetical tradition and explore their meaning with regard to the poetry from which they are contextualized. In the final analysis du can be understood as the ontic quality of the heart-mind within the broad sense of cheng (誠 sincerity), or devout love, whereas shendu can be regarded as a process of moral cultivation. To some extent the re-interpretation of these terms finds commonality with, rather than subverts, the semantic ranges established by traditional glosses. The recovered texts have enhanced our understanding of these terms, in particular the concepts of heart-mind and emotion in early China.     

Accuracy, Sincerity and Capabilities in the Practice of Teaching

This paper examines the relative strengths of two conceptions of teaching. The thinner conception, which underpins a report of the Ministerial Committee on Teacher Education in South Africa, takes the definitive purpose of teaching as the organization of systematic learning. The thicker conception draws on work by Martha Nussbaum and Bernard Williams and comes from my ongoing thinking about the conditions for trustworthy practice. I propose that educative teaching is a practice whose definitive purpose is to enable people’s flourishing by developing their capabilities as these are connected to what Williams calls ‘the virtues of truth’—‘Accuracy’ and ‘Sincerity’. I consider the case for claiming (i) that the purpose of educative teaching is to enable learners to develop the virtues of truth and (ii) that trustworthy practice depends on teachers having these virtues themselves. En route I challenge MacIntyre’s grounds for refusing to admit teaching as a practice.     

Temporally selective attention modulates early perceptual processing: event-related potential evidence

Some of the most important information we encounter changes so rapidly that our perceptual systems cannot process all of it in detail. Spatially selective attention is critical for perception when more information than can be processed in detail is presented simultaneously at distinct locations. When presented with complex, rapidly changing information, listeners may need to selectively attend to specific times rather than to locations. We present evidence that listeners can direct selective attention to time points that differ by as little as 500 msec, and that doing so improves target detection, affects baseline neural activity preceding stimulus presentation, and modulates auditory evoked potentials at a perceptually early stage. These data demonstrate that attentional modulation of early perceptual processing is temporally precise and that listeners can flexibly allocate temporally selective attention over short intervals, making it a viable mechanism for preferentially processing the most relevant segments in rapidly changing streams.     

Stepping Stones Triple P: An RCT of a Parenting Program with Parents of a Child Diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder

Whilst the Triple P Positive Parenting Program has a large evidence base (Sanders, Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review 2:71–90, 1999; Sanders, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 68:624–640, 2000) and preliminary evidence indicates that Stepping Stones Triple P is also efficacious (Roberts, Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 35(2):180–193, 2006), to date Stepping Stones has not been evaluated with the ASD population. Fifty-nine families with a child with ASD aged between 2 and 9 participated in this randomized controlled trial. The results demonstrate significant improvements in parental reports of child behaviour and parenting styles with the treatment effects for child behaviour, parental over reactivity and parental verbosity being maintained at follow-up 6 months later. Further, the results suggest significant improvements in parental satisfaction and conflict about parenting as well as a sleeper effect for parental efficacy. The results indicate that Stepping Stones Triple P is a promising intervention for parents of children with ASD. Limitations and future research are also addressed.     

Maintenance of Treatment Gains: A Comparison of Enhanced,Standard, and Self-directed Triple P-Positive Parenting Program

This report describes the 3 year outcomes of three different variants of the Triple P-Positive Parenting Program, a behavioural family intervention. Families were randomly assigned to one of three intervention conditions or to a waitlist condition. At 1 year follow-up there were similar improvements on observational and self-report measures of preschooler disruptive behaviour for Enhanced, Standard and Self Directed variants of Triple P. At 3 year follow-up (completed by 139 families), each condition showed a similar level of maintenance of intervention effects. Approximately 2/3 of preschoolers who were clinically elevated on measures of disruptive behaviour at pre-intervention moved from the clinical to the non-clinical range. Across conditions, there was a comparable preventive effect for each intervention for these high risk children. The implications of the findings for the development of brief, cost effective parenting interventions within a public health framework are discussed.