Self-injurious behavior is prevalent in early childhood and it affects almost 53% of young children with disabilities. Once these behaviors are consistently present, they may become resistant to intervention. The purpose of this article is to provide early care and education center providers and family caregivers with ways to effectively reduce…

Emotion dysregulation (ED) underlies psychiatric symptoms and impedes adaptive responses in autistic individuals. The Emotion Awareness and Skills Enhancement (EASE) program was the first mindfulness-based intervention designed to target emotion dysregulation in autistic adolescents (12-17 years old). This project partnered with stakeholders to…

Many teachers struggle with effectively managing challenging behavior, which occurs in the majority of classrooms serving young children. Teachers of young children (ages 3-8) commonly cite noncompliance, aggression, disruptive behavior, and poor social skills as being among the most challenging behaviors (Snell et al., 2012). For many of these…

In 1986, Reactor 4 in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. Within a year of exposure to radiation poisoning the rate of cancer, particularly leukaemia and thyroid cancer, was reported as 100 times higher in children living in contaminated areas. Volunteers in more than 18 countries responded by establishing a network of recuperative…

This study describes the development and evaluation of a behavioral parent training protocol via telecommunication for three parents of preschool children with autism, with limited access to behavioral expertise. A single-subject, multiple baseline experimental design across child behaviors, replicated across parents, was used to evaluate the…

Parent training has been shown to be an important means of supporting families living with autism--but such services are not universally accessible. A multinational project funded by the European Commission has been developed in order to establish such parent training in three south-eastern European countries. To ensure that the training was…

Numerous evidence-based classroom management strategies to prevent and respond to problem behavior have been identified, but research consistently indicates teachers rarely implement them with sufficient implementation fidelity. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of implementation planning, a strategy involving logistical…

This pilot study describes the development and initial implementation of a treatment program that uses relationship-based techniques as a basis for promoting characteristics important in learning and emotional regulation. A case example has been included as an illustration of the theoretical framework of this intervention, along with preliminary…

The persistence of challenging behaviors for some children highlights a need and an opportunity to explore several key principles of behavioral intervention that are necessary for effective decision- making when more personalized interventions must be layered on top of high-quality universal supports. In the absence of expert support,…

A consumer perspective can contribute much to enhancing the "ecological fit" of population-level parenting interventions so they meet the needs of parents. This approach involves building relationships with consumer groups and soliciting consumer input into the relevance and acceptability of interventions, clarifying the enablers and barriers to…

"Bella is a 5-year-old girl with autism who attends a reverse inclusive preschool class. She primarily uses gestures and a communication binder to communicate with others. In addition, she is not toilet trained even though her teachers and her parents have tried numerous attempts over a 3-year period to train her. Bella also has gastrointestinal…

This article addresses Systems Theory as it applies to school-age children's bullying behavior. It focuses on the interrelationships, mutual influences, and dynamics of relationships within the family, and how these may affect children's behavior toward their peers. The theory helps to explain the ways family patterns are reflected in…

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for children (MBCT-C) is a manualized group psychotherapy for children ages 9-13 years old, which was developed specifically to increase social-emotional resiliency through the enhancement of mindful attention. Program development is described along with results of the initial randomized controlled trial. We…

Challenging behaviours in young children impact upon schools and families and can lead to more serious challenges in adolescence and adulthood. In the last decade, there has been an increasing trend towards the development of early intervention and prevention programs that serve to draw on child competencies to ameliorate some of the factors that…

The collection of articles in this special issue on relational aggression gives a glimpse into the complex social networks, first, of children's relational aggression and, second, of the collaborators who develop and validate children's prevention programs. The programs described in this special section are among the first to address relational…