ABSTRACT
Parent training is coming of age, as Forehand and Forgatch's work illustrates so clearly. Their chapters reflect the growing maturity of the field of parent training, which has clearly established itself over the past 20 years as a major contributor to the understanding and remediation of childhood behavior problems. When I first read Forehand and Forgatch's papers and began to reflect on this coming of age, I experienced what I can only describe as mixed feelings, something which we were once told behaviorally-oriented researchers and clinicians were not meant to experience (or, at least, should keep to themselves). On the one hand, I felt very positive about the maturity of our field. More specifically, I was amazed by Forehand and Forgatch's tenacity and determination. They and their colleagues have not spent the last 20 years dabbling in different research areas, as dictated by fashion or funding priorities. Rather, they have consistently studied the development and treatment of antisocial behavior, providing us with a good example of the power of very thin intermittent schedules of reinforcement in the control of researchers’ behavior. The knowledge that their persistence has brought is clearly reflected in the richness and complexity of their contributions here. On the other hand, I was unable to suppress feelings of disappointment that no more progress had been accomplished in what appears to me to be a very long time. How much have we learned in 20 years about the development and treatment of antisocial behavior? At the risk of offending them, I must ask Forgatch and Forehand: Twenty years of hard work and all you have to show for it is a mathematical model that looks like a black dress, or that parent training may not only serve to treat conduct disorder children but also to prevent the development of delinquency in adolescence? To avoid the easy trap of cynicism, consider where parent training research started and where it may now take us, following the leads provided by colleagues such as Forehand and For-gatch.
