Parent–Child Conversations about the Past: Exercises for the Child’s Study of the Present

We outline ideas and research in training parents to help their children to appreciate historical patterns of social contingencies as well as contingencies in the present. Parents’ use of “lessons and dialogue” is presented as a means of guiding the children’s efforts to describe their past experiences in narrative format, along with teaching the children about contingency management in the present. Lessons define this latter type of parent teaching, and dialogue defines the former type. Our focus is on dialogue because it is not well known in the parent training literature. A case study is included to illustrate the potential benefits and problems encountered in training parents to use dialogue.