For whom is the treatment component of TAPP-C appropriate?

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

TAPP-C has been developed as a targeted therapy to be used for both the caregivers of children and adolescents between the ages of two and 17 who have been involved in firesetting or other types of fire involvement and the children themselves.

For the purposes of this manual, fire involvement is defined as any unsanctioned or dangerous fire-related behaviour that has been threatened, planned or carried out. Fire involvement may include, but is not limited to:

• unsanctioned igniting of matches, lighters or other ignition sources and/or accelerants (“match and/or lighter play”)
• unsanctioned and/or exploratory igniting of paper, garbage, leaves or small objects (“fire play”)
• intentional igniting of objects, buildings, vehicles or persons (“firesetting” or “arson” where legal charges have been laid) and
• bomb-making.

Fire involvement may occur on one occasion only or frequently. It may be carried out by individuals or by a group of individuals. It may result from impulsivity, boredom, curiosity, attention-seeking, maliciousness or a pathological interest in fire.

The children and adolescents who are appropriate for TAPP-C may be living in family homes, foster homes, group homes or residential or custodial facilities. In each context, the appropriate participants include the child or adolescent, the primary caregiver of the child or adolescent, and any caregivers with whom the child or adolescent visits regularly; for example, a non-custodial parent. On some occasions, it may be appropriate to include other family members, but that is a clinical decision best made on a case-by-case basis.

This manual is likely to be most helpful for families with children between the ages of six and 12 years and the clinicians working with them. Although TAPP-C has been used with children from two- to 17-years-old, this manual focuses on describing most fully the interventions used with the typical firesetter; that is, a child between six and 12 years of age. For children who are younger or older, it will be necessary to modify the interventions somewhat. Some appropriate modifications have been described in the Special Issues section.

The ideal and alternative formats of the TAPP-C treatment model

The model of TAPP-C service delivery that has been used throughout the follow-up evaluation study involves two clinicians working together concurrently to help the family. One clinician works primarily with the child, and the other works primarily with the caregiver (or parent).

As described in this manual, each session begins with a joint meeting of the two clinicians and both the child and the caregiver. During the joint meeting, home practice exercises are reviewed and any obstacles to progress are identified and addressed. Following this, the parent and child are seen separately by one clinician each in order to cover the content material and skill development exercises. Each session ends with another brief joint meeting in which the caregiver and the child share with each other what they have learned, and discuss the home practice exercises for the coming week.

Currently, this is the ideal format, yet it is recognized that some agencies may not be able to provide service in this way; for instance, it may be that there are resources for only one clinician per family. Accordingly, this manual has also been designed to permit joint sessions with the caregiver and the child, with one clinician. Or a single clinician may see the caregiver and the child separately on alternating weeks, or may work through all of the caregiver sessions, then all of the child sessions. We don’t recommend that there be only sessions with the caregiver or only sessions with the child as the efficacy of these alternative models of TAPP-C service delivery have not yet been evaluated.

A group format may be possible for the caregiver sessions. At this point, however, group administration of the child or adolescent component of the therapy is not generally recommended. Some evidence in the literature on antisocial behaviour suggests that providing mental health services to antisocial youth in groups may yield no treatment effects whatsoever or even exacerbate youth symptomatology (Dishion, McCord & Poulin, 1999). Other evidence, however, indicates treatment models using a multi-faceted approach, where groups for pre-adolescent children are one component, can be successful (Hrynkiw-Augimeri, Pepler & Goldberg, 1993; Bloomquist & Schnell, 2002; Earlscourt Child and Family Centre, 2001a, 2001b).

Until further research determines under what circumstances group intervention with antisocial children and youth is successful, the prudent course of action is to treat children and adolescents individually, especially in the case of adolescents.

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