Italy endured one of the most restrictive and prolonged COVID-19 lockdowns, leaving parents at home 24/7 without the ability to take their children out for a walk or receive in-home help for three months. Overnight, they became their child’s sole educator and caregiver, facing completely new and unprecedented challenges. Creating an environment that would foster both parental procedural fidelity and, more importantly, treatment adherence became essential for the child’s well-being.
This situation required extending the behavioral focus beyond the child as the sole learner to include the parent, whose target behavior was implementing the intervention amidst a complex system of competing contingencies. Identifying and managing these environmental pressures became a crucial part of our role as behavioral engineers. This included teaching parents how to schedule time, delegate chores to other family members, encourage siblings to self-entertain, and arrange breaks from continuous interaction for all family members.
Adhering to treatment involves engaging in a complex chain of behaviors influenced by various contingencies competing for response allocation. Behavior analysis provides clinicians with unique tools to evaluate the conditions under which individuals are more or less likely to engage in certain behaviors, and, more importantly, the technology to alter the effects of competing establishing operations to create new learning histories.
Francesca degli Espinosa
Board Member
B. F. Skinner Foundation