Coping Power Program

The Coping Power Program is a multicomponent preventive intervention for aggressive children that uses the contextual sociocognitive model as its conceptual framework. On the basis of this contextual sociocognitive model, Coping Power Program was developed with parent and child components. Intervention covers 15 months (the 2nd half of 1 academic year and all of the next). The child component includes eight intervention sessions in the 1st intervention year and 25 in the 2nd intervention year. The Coping Power child component sessions emphasize the following: behavioral and personal goal-setting, awareness of feelings and associated physiological arousal, use of coping self-statements, distraction techniques and relaxation methods when provoked and made angry, organizational and study skills, perspective taking and attribution retraining, social problem-solving skills, and dealing with peer pressure and neighborhood-based problems by using refusal skills.

The parent component consists of 16 group sessions over the same 15-month intervention period. It is delivered in groups of four to six single parents or couples. Groups usually meet at the boys' schools and are led by two staff persons. Assertive attempts are made to promote parent attendance and to include both mothers and fathers in parent groups. The content of the parent component was derived from social-learning-theory-based parent training programs. Parents learn skills for identifying prosocial and disruptive behavioral targets in their children, rewarding appropriate child behaviors, giving effective instructions, establishing age-appropriate rules and expectations for children, applying effective consequences to negative child behavior, and establishing ongoing family communication through weekly family meetings. In addition, parents learn to support the sociocognitive skills that children learn in the Coping Power child component and to use stress-management skills to remain calm and in control during stressful or irritating disciplinary interactions with their children.

The goal of this program is to reduce aggressive behavior and delinquency in children by applying the contextual sociocognitive model.

The evaluation used an experimental design with treatment and control groups. Results indicate that the Coping Power Program had significant impact on three of five follow-up outcomes. Specifically, boys who had participated in the program along with their parents had lower rates of self-reported covert delinquent behavior (theft, fraud, property damage) at the time of the 1-year follow-up. The program also had significant follow-up effects on teachers' ratings of children's improvements in school behavioral problems during the academic year after the program was completed. Boys who had been in the program demonstrated increasing behavioral improvements in school throughout the follow-up year, suggesting that intervention-produced changes in children's abilities to cope effectively with difficult peer and adult conflicts had continued to grow in the year following intervention.

Finally, both the parent and child components appear to have important roles in influencing boys' functioning at a 1-year follow-up. While the child component influenced improvements in boys' behavior at school, the parent component appeared to be the most critical intervention influence on boys' covert delinquency and substance use at follow-up. In addition, there was evidence that Coping Power had clearer effects on white boys' parent-rated substance use and school behavior functioning than was the case for minority children, most of whom were African-American.