Behavior management is a pretty cold term. Who wants to do behavior management? People don’t adopt in order to spend their time managing behavior. People adopt because they want relationships.

Jeffrey Haugaard, Ph.D, reported on research conducted at Cornell University. Behavior management (there’s that term again!) of two parent families who had adopted school aged children were studied.

Dr. Haugaard reported that couples who agree on their behavior management methods had success. Couples who disagreed were raising children whose behavior continued to get worse.

The research suggests that the method of behavior management is less important than agreeing.

So that might mean that adoptive couples would benefit more from intervention for themselves on how to arrive at agreement than they would from training on how to manage difficult behavior.

Like most things in life, the outcomes have everything to do with relationships.