What is TAPP-C?

Excerpted from Part 1: About the Program - TAPP-C: Clinician’s Manual for Preventing and Treating Juvenile Fire Involvement.

The Arson Prevention Program for Children (TAPP-C) was developed in the early 1990s as an empirically-based assessment and intervention program to address the firesetting behaviours of children and youth.

TAPP-C is a collaborative program that brings together fire service and mental health professionals to work with children, teens and their families to eliminate dangerous fire-related behaviours. Fire service professionals provide children and teens and their families with home fire-safety checks and fire-safety education, and mental health professionals conduct risk assessments and provide parent- and child-focused treatment within a mental health framework.

TAPP-C was developed as a joint venture of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, the Office of the Fire Marshal of Ontario and the Toronto Fire Services. Each of these organizations continues to provide TAPP-C with ongoing support.

The mental health treatment component of TAPP-C is a brief intervention program with two modules: one for parents and caregivers (who in this manual are referred to collectively as caregivers) and another, similar module for children and youth (who in this manual are referred to collectively as children).

The intervention program has been designed to specifically address firesetting and all other types of inappropriate fire involvement by children and adolescents. It uses principles of parent management training (PMT) for caregivers (Cunningham, Bremner & Boyle, 1995; Kazdin, Siegel & Bass, 1992; Webster-Stratton, Hollinsworth & Kolpacoff, 1989) and elements of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) for children and youth (Augimeri, Koegl & Goldberg, 2001; Kazdin, Bass, Siegel & Thomas, 1989; Kendall & Braswell, 1993; Larson & Lochman, 2002; Webster, Augimeri & Koegl, 2002).

The treatment component of TAPP-C is considered one piece of a broad range of services that may be necessary to provide to children and their caregivers in order to adequately address children’s fire involvement. Ideally, prior to providing the treatment component of TAPP-C, children’s firesetting risk should be evaluated using a combination of specialized firesetting risk assessment and general mental health assessment. Based on the results of these assessments, particular children may be provided with the TAPP-C treatment component in combination with more general mental health treatment; other children, whose firesetting risk is determined to be low, may receive the TAPP-C treatment as a stand-alone intervention.

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