ABSTRACT

Social-Emotional Prevention Program (SEP) is a multifocused prevention program. For the purposes of the current study, high risk preschoolers were selected from a larger sample of 275 children based on teacher and parent separate evaluations of social and emotional development. Children’s classroom behaviors, children’s behaviors at home and their parents’ practices were comparatively assessed based on their initial risk status. Children from the social competence high risk group showed significant improvements compared to their control group counterparts on measures of classroom behavior. Improved competencies, as well as lower levels of externalizing and internalizing problems were also found for children from the high risk emotional competence group. However, the data suggest that emotional competence deficits might have a more damaging effect on children’s ability to develop appropriate social skills. Our data confirm that SEP sustained children’s skill transfer to parent-child interactions, but this is more likely to occur for those skills which were rated as deficient by parents. Also, in both emotional and social competence high risk groups, the intervention’s effectiveness on externalizing problems increased as a result of higher attendance rates to the parent training. The effects on parent practices revealed only the presence of significant trends in the intervention group, but no between group differences on measures of parent discipline and parent stress. These data were similar in both categories of high risk children.

KEYWORDS: social-emotional competencies, preschool, high risk, indicated intervention, multifocused

PAGES:319-356