Deliberate Practice in Behavioral Parent Training

Bys: Terjesen, Mark D., Vidair, Hilary B., Ohr, Phyllis S.

Deliberate practice exercises provide trainees and students an opportunity to build competence in essential behavioral parent training skills while developing their own personal therapeutic style.

These exercises present role-playing scenarios in which two trainees act as a client and a clinician, switching back and forth under the guidance of a supervisor. The clinician improvises appropriate and authentic responses to client statements organized into three difficulty levels--beginner, intermediate, and advanced--that reflect common client questions and concerns.

Trainees will learn how to collaborate with parents to help them build positive relationships with their children as a foundation for creating behavioral change. They will learn how to teach parenting skills like praise to encourage positive behaviors, planned ignoring, establishing consequences that are respectful and developmentally appropriate, and strategies for parents to manage their own strong emotions.

Step-by-step instructions guide participants through the exercises, identify criteria for mastering each skill, and explain how to monitor and adjust difficulty. Guidelines to help trainers and trainees get the most out of training are also provided.

To demonstrate how deliberate practice can be fully integrated into a professional curriculum, this series features exercises developed and refined within the clinical training curriculum at the Sentio online/hybrid marriage and family therapy (MFT) therapist training program in California, which is where we started developing this series. These exercises, which have been tested at clinical training sites around the world, are used to enhance clinical outcomes within the first hybrid MFT program approved by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences to fully integrate deliberate practice into its entire curriculum. By integrating these models into its hybrid MFT program in California, Sentio University demonstrates that therapist training graduate programs can use deliberate practice to bridge the gap between theory and clinical mastery through repetitive, feedback-informed practice to support the development of modern, outcome-focused clinicians.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1433840413
• ISBN13: 9781433840418
• Release Date: December 2025
• Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
• Length: 241 Pages
• Weight: 1.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 8.5" x 10.9"