How We Prevent the Prevention of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

Popular rhetoric supports prevention, but action does not match the rhetoric. Legitimate concerns are promoted to primacy, precluding preventive action. Prevention may be thwarted by expressing overriding concern for labels and stigma, objecting to a medical model and failure-driven services, preferring false negatives to false positives, proposing a paradigm shift, calling special education ineffective, misconstruing the least restrictive and least intrusive intervention, protesting the percentage of children receiving services, complaining that special education already costs too much, maintaining developmental optimism, denouncing disproportional identification, defending diversity, and denying or dodging deviance. The mechanisms explaining the avoidance of prevention include delayed negative reinforcement of prevention, immediate positive reinforcement of competing behaviors, social punishment of prevention, and modeling. Implications for practice are suggested.