The Stop and Think Approach

The Core Knowledge Foundation has partnered with Stop and Think to bring you The Stop and Think Parenting Book: A Guide to Children's Good Behavior. This publication, developed by Howard M. Knoff, Ph.D., complements the social skills program utilized in the Core Knowledge preschool classrooms to teach the social skills identified in the Preschool Sequence. Core Knowledge preschools use the Stop and Think approach to teach social skills in their classrooms. The approach, however, is appropriate for use with children from preschool age through elementary school.

The Stop and Think Social Skill Training program uses a five-step approach for teaching, reinforcing or using any of the social skills mentioned above. The five steps are

• Stop and Think! This step is designed to condition children to take the time necessary to calm down and think about how they want to handle a situation.
• Are You Going To Make a Good Choice or a Bad Choice? This step provides children with a chance to decide what kind of choice they want to make. With help from parents and teachers, along with the meaningful positive and negative consequences for various choices, children decide to make “Good Choices.”
  
• What Are Your Choices or Steps? This step helps children to develop a specific plan before implementing a social skill. Here is where parents and teachers assist children by providing possible good choices or by actually teaching specific skills by breaking them into their component behavioral parts. This step helps children to “think before they act”—getting them ready to move into action.
  
• Just Do It! Here is where children actually perform their
  “Good Choice” behavior. If the specific skill or choice works, great! If not, the child is either provided with additional choices by their parents or teachers, or they are taught a new skill to use. Sometimes, they are prompted to go over the steps of a previously taught skill to make sure they are using it properly. Once successful, it’s on to the last step.
• Good Job! This step prompts children to reinforce their own abilities to successfully use social skills and successfully respond to various situations or requests. This step is important because children—and adults—do not always reward themselves for making good choices and doing a good job. Thus, this step teaches self-reinforcement.

Parents learn the program through the use of the Stop and Think Parenting Book: A Guide to Children's Good Behavior, accompanied by its 75-minute demonstration DVD, Teaching Children to Stop and Think at Home: A Parent's Guide to Teaching Good Behavior.

These two teaching tools can also be used by professionals, such as counselors, social workers, psychologists and prevention specialists, in leading parenting classes and seminars in the Stop and Think Program.

Guided by the book and DVD (and by a professional who is offering the program through their child’s child care center, preschool, elementary school, community agency, or religious or civic group), parents learn the five-step Stop and Think approach and how to teach the social skills to their preschool and/or elementary school children. Different suggestions are provided for teaching preschool, as well as early- and late-elementary school children, taking the child’s level of development into consideration.

Parents learn how to introduce and practice the social skills so that the skills are performed by their children more and more successfully and automatically over time. They are specifically “coached” in the best ways to talk to their children, to motivate their children, and to stay consistent with their children across different settings, situations, and circumstances.

The book also prompts them to watch one of the nine DVD segments that show real parents teaching their own children the Stop and Think process.
The book includes a calendar with guidelines and dates for teaching and reinforcing the social skills for up to a full year. It also includes forms that help parents to keep track of their children's progress, Cue Cards on which each skill is broken into its component behavioral steps, and Parenting Points to consider and keep in mind when teaching a specific skill.

Once again, given the developmental differences between younger and older children, there are separate Cue Cards and Parenting Points to use when teaching the skills to preschool and early elementary school children versus middle and late elementary school children.

This Stop & Think Program can be self-taught by parents who purchase the Book/DVD package or obtain it through their local schools or agencies. This Program also can be taught by professionals to parent groups using the same instructional package that the parents receive.

Next article