What does the treatment component of TAPP-C involve?

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

The TAPP-C intervention approach is collaborative, involving clinicians, caregivers and children working together to address fire involvement. The role of the clinician is to help caregivers and children develop and implement their own individualized solutions to the fire involvement.

Parent management training (PMT) programs have been developed to help the parents of children with disruptive behaviour enhance their skills in reducing their children’s difficult behaviours. Similar to such PMT programs, one of the goals of the treatment component of TAPP-C is to help enhance the skills of the caregivers of children with identified fire-related behaviours, in part by promoting their children’s fire-safe behaviours. As well, the TAPP-C intervention addresses parental supervision and monitoring practices, reinforcing and consequencing behaviour, and planning for future difficulties within the context of the child’s fire involvement.

Similar to cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) programs that have been developed for children and adolescents with impulse control difficulties (e.g., Earlscourt Child and Family Centre, 2001a, 200lb), the TAPP-C intervention program also aims to provide children and adolescents with strategies to recognize and control their fire-related impulses and behaviours.

The treatment component of TAPP-C is derived from a social learning theoretical framework and is based on the following three principles:

1. Fire involvement by children and teens indicates an absence of fire-safe behaviours.
2. Fire-related behaviours are learned.
3. The family home—or an alternative caregiving environment—is an important setting for learning fire-safe behaviours.

The TAPP-C treatment component involves approximately five 90-minute sessions with the caregiver(s) and five 90-minute sessions with the child. The caregiver and child sessions contain some overlapping content and some content that is unique to each.

Ideally, two clinicians are available to work independently with the child and caregiver(s) for each session so that the child and caregiver modules can run concurrently. With this model, each session begins and ends with a joint meeting of the caregiver and child together with the clinicians. The purpose of the joint meetings is to enhance co-operation by jointly reviewing the core content of the session and the home practice exercises. If only one clinician is available, alternative models are possible.

Each treatment session includes:

• checking in about any further fire involvement
• reviewing information about the child’s fire-specific experience related to the session topic
• psychoeducation about a target skill for that session
• in-session practice of the new skill and
• take-home exercises for skill development.

Using intervention strategies that emphasize active client participation has been found to provide greater treatment efficacy (Bloomquist & Schnell, 2002; Reid, Patterson & Snyder, 2002). Accordingly, the TAPP-C treatment component places heavy emphasis on client participation and practice. For example, clinicians are encouraged to guide participants through thoughtful questions so that participants will generate their own plans for addressing the fire involvement, identify obstacles to implementing those plans, and come up with their own potential solutions to likely barriers.

The TAPP-C treatment component includes the following topics:

• the dangerousness of fire involvement
• the importance of fire-safe attitudes
• the role of fire-safe behaviours for the family
• understanding and eliminating access to fire-starting materials and other fire-related materials
• eliminating inappropriate modelling of fire-related behaviour
• understanding high risk situations and other triggers to fire involvement
• improving supervision and monitoring practices
• developing alternative responses to triggers
• understanding the consequences of fire involvement and developing an appropriate consequence plan
• gaining support from others and
• planning for the future and monitoring for changes that may signal increased risk.

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