By Erin Jester
If you ask her students and colleagues, they’ll tell you it’s difficult to overstate the impact Cheryl McNeil, Ph.D., has had on the world of child psychology.
For her immense contributions to the field, the University of Florida College of Public Health and Health Professions has named McNeil its 2024 Outstanding Alumna of the Year.
“It means a lot, particularly being back here,” said McNeil, who received her Ph.D. from the Department of Clinical and Health Psychology in 1989 and is currently a professor of psychiatry in the College of Medicine. “I was very excited and humbled by it.”
McNeil’s life’s work has been in Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, a treatment for young children with disruptive behavior, which she was instrumental in researching and implementing, and is now practiced worldwide. She is the author of more than 150 research articles and seven books, with an eighth being published later this year, and a recipient of numerous awards.
McNeil’s interest in psychology began in high school, when she saw a Hallmark movie about children with autism. In it, she recalled seeing a child who would spin plates for hours at a time, and later learned about other repetitive behaviors associated with autism spectrum disorder.
“I was fascinated by the idea that there would be children all over the world, on every continent, that would have these same behaviors,” she said, and she wanted to know why.
After receiving her bachelor’s degree from Louisiana State University, McNeil, a Miami native, decided to pursue a master’s degree at UF for its clinical program in child psychology. There, she met the person who would entirely shape her career.
Sheila Eyberg, Ph.D., was a visiting associate professor of clinical psychology while on a year-long sabbatical from the University of Oregon. She had just developed a new approach for curbing disruptive behavior in young children, called Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, and McNeil began working with Eyberg on the groundbreaking method.
PCIT is an intervention for children aged 2 and 7 who display challenging behaviors such as hyperactivity, defiance, temper tantrums and aggression. Rather than interacting directly with a child, the therapist speaks to a parent or caretaker through an earpiece from behind a two-way mirror while the parent and child play. The therapist tells the parent exactly what to say and do while the child is engaging in either challenging or positive behavior.
“In PCIT, parents learn to be experts at behavior management so that they can use the skills of a therapist 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” McNeil said. “They need to be the ones who can bring out the best in their child, not [the therapist].”
PCIT is one of just a few therapeutic treatments for children that has been quantitatively proven to work, and fast. McNeil said she was stunned by how dramatically the children’s behavior improved in a short period of time.
Research by Eyberg and others shows that PCIT’s positive effects on behavior last at least four years in 75 percent of children who receive treatment.
“I was just in awe that a psychological intervention could be that powerful,” McNeil said.
McNeil was in need of a mentor for her Ph.D. work, and Eyberg needed a doctoral student. Eyberg decided to stay at UF after her sabbatical year, and McNeil became her first. The pair performed efficacy studies on PCIT in the controlled environment of the university labs, then started to introduce the method into the community.
The University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center hired McNeil for a yearlong internship after her Ph.D., where she created the first PCIT program in the state. She grew the program through grants for five years, then spent 28 years teaching psychology at West Virginia University and continuing her research in PCIT. When her husband Daniel McNeil – whom she met while at UF as a student – was hired in 2022 as a professor and chair of the UF Department of Community Dentistry and Behavioral Science, she was happy to head back to Florida.
“I don’t think there’s any other university in the world we could’ve been pulled away from West Virginia for other than the Swamp,” she said. “This felt like home to us.”
At West Virginia University, McNeil worked with a promising undergraduate student who she encouraged to go to graduate school. That student was Brittany Bailey, Ph.D., who McNeil continued to mentor through Bailey’s doctoral work in the Department of Clinical and Health Psychology.
“She had the hugest impact on me of anybody in an academic setting,” said Bailey, who nominated McNeil for the Outstanding Alumni award.
Bailey said she was once at a conference and the speaker asked how many people in the room had been trained in PCIT by McNeil.
“The number of people in the room who stood up was just incredible,” she said. “Her role in spreading this, not just in the United States but around the world, is really remarkable.”
During her doctoral work in PCIT, Bailey remembered raising a concern that clinicians were working so hard to build relationships between foster children and their caretakers, knowing the relationship often ends. She wondered if building that bond would eventually hurt the children when they moved on from a foster family.
McNeil’s response? It’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.
Bailey’s perspective totally changed. “Even if it’s temporary,” she said, “we can build a relationship for that kid that changes the framework for their relationships more broadly.”
“I feel super fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with her over the years,” Bailey said. “When we think about an outstanding alumna, she’s the first that would come to my mind.”
When McNeil heard that she won the award, she told her husband, then immediately called Eyberg to share the news.
“She is the reason,” McNeil said.r
More than 40 years after beginning her work with PCIT, McNeil continues to help children and families in new ways all the time.
During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, McNeil developed a behavioral program to help children and parents who were struggling to navigate the new world of online schooling and working from home. She decided to release the program, called The Cooperation Chart, for free as a public service for stressed families.
Among the most important lessons McNeil learned at UF, she said, was the impact of research.
“One way to help people is to do individual work as a clinician,” McNeil said. “But when you do research, you can help even more people than you could if you saw patients hour after hour. When you do research, you develop the technologies that all of those clinicians then use in order to help people.”
She advised students who want to pursue a career in the field not to limit themselves by thinking they can only be licensed psychologists or counselors. With so many different paths in research, clinical and advocacy work, she said, it’s a career where one seldom gets bored.
“If I was 22 years old again and trying to figure out what career I’d want, I can’t think of another one I’d rather have,” she said. “I’d do it again.”