RESEARCH

The most prevalent mental health and social problem for children is the set of behaviors known as externalizing disorders. In adolescence, the problems include aggression, delinquency, and general flaunting of family and societal rules and expectations. Such behavior patterns are established early in childhood, and their precursors are evident in toddlers who are defiant, disobedient, and aggressive. One major cause of externalizing problems in toddlers is inept parental discipline. Inept discipline comprises a range of parenting methods that are ineffective and often counterproductive in managing toddlers' inappropriate behavior and in teaching them to behave in accordance with reasonable family and societal expectations for appropriate behavior.

My interests lie in:

A. clarifying which discipline strategies are effective and which are not,

B. understanding how parents develop strategies for managing inappropriate child behavior.

C. identifying environmental and parent characteristics that mitigate against parents' developing and/or implementing effective discipline strategies,

D. teaching at-risk parents to discipline successfully before their children develop behavior problems, and

E. providing effective early interventions for parents whose toddlers are defiant, disobedient, and aggressive.

Research being conducted by our group addresses these areas of interest in a variety of ways.

Current projects are designed:

1. to identify factors that can be assessed when infants are 7-9 months old and that predict how well mothers will manage inappropriate behavior when their children are 24 months old. This should prepare us to conduct primary prevention work.

2. to further our understanding of how maternal attributions for the causes of child misbehavior influence mothers' parenting.

3. to develop a treatment for angry mothers of oppositional toddlers.

4. to test a model that hypothesizes both unique and common predictors of partner and parent aggression. We (i.e., Amy Smith Slep and I) are conducting this 5-yr NIMH-supported project in collaboration with Dr. Dan O’Leary (a close relation J ). A representative sample of 450 couples who have children 3-7 yrs old have provided us with extensive questionnaire, observational, and physiological data.

In the future, I am particularly interested in developing and testing the efficacy of (a) preventive interventions for parents of 12-15 month-old children and (b) focused treatment modules for parents of 2-3 year-old children, modules similar to those we have tested for treating toddlers’ bedtime and nighttime problems.

Thanks for visiting!

Susan G. O'Leary, Ph.D.

Professor