So many clinicians have experienced making gains with children or adolescents, only to have them experience barriers in how parents respond to those gains. This makes pulling parents in to the therapeutic process so important. Some therapies even have parent-training built in (trauma-focused CBT). How do clinicians help parents effectively respond to their children and to their own stress? Emotion-Savvy Parenting training provides a nice approach.
Most parents just want to enjoy the time with their children and connect deeply with them. However, emotional and behavioral difficulties can make that process difficult for both parent and child. And how parents respond to their children sometimes contributes to those difficulties.
Traditional parent training helps parents learn skills to respond to negative child behaviors effectively, while also reinforcing prosocial behaviors. Which behaviors to reinforce, which to punish, and which to strategically ignore, and when to engage emotionally with the child.
Emotion-Savvy Parenting training has an element of those traditional approaches, but also takes a relationship-centered approach. The emphasis is on helping parents learn evidence-based strategies for how to regulate their own emotions in response to parenting stress.
These strategies likely inevitably help the child as well. But the emphasis is on helping parents learn to respond to children differently, connect more deeply with their children, and enjoy all of it. The Cognitive Behavior Institute has a good training to help parents understand and learn these skills.
Pros: This training is highly evidence-based while combining with real life examples. The approach is based on decades of extensive research on both emotion regulation and parenting. It is also led by the highly-credentialed expert who quite literally “wrote the book” on these approaches (her book was just released!). Also, $25 is a great value!
Cons: The training is live and not done on demand, but worse things have happened.
Parenting can be hectic and stressful no matter how you slice it. For those parents who experience difficultly interacting with children, emotion-savvy parenting training is there to help parents learn invaluable tools to help parenting feel more valuable.
