Parent Training

When it comes to managing your children, do you feel that for every step forward, you are taking three steps back? Do you feel helpless against your child’s emotional, academic or behavioural issues? Parent training can help parents acquire the necessary skills to effectively apply and follow through with discipline, improve parent-child relationships, encourage children academically and improve behavioural issues. Parents are the key agents of change in their child’s life and we aim to help them feel empowered and encouraged to learn and grow.

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What is Parent Training?

As parents, we try our best, but children don’t come with an instruction manual and people are not born with the ability to parent. Our knowledge of parenting may come from a variety of sources including our own parents, guardians, grandparents, books, online forums, or tv shows. However, each child is unique and, sometimes, everything you thought you knew doesn’t work for your individual circumstances. Parent training involves a series of treatment programs aimed at changing parenting behaviours, teaching parents about the effective use of positive and negative reinforcements, and providing parents with effective skills to correct behavioural problems, and help the child develop healthy and constructive strategies to manage difficult emotions, thoughts and experiences.

How Can Parent Training Help Children?

Children want to be “good”, but sometimes they just don’t know how. Their home life may lack a parental presence, structure, or discipline which prevents them from reaching appropriate behavioural, emotional or social milestones.
Children with behavioural, emotional, or self-regulation issues don’t simply grow out of it. Untreated childhood behavioural disorders often develop into long term academic, social, emotional, vocational, and interpersonal difficulties that last into adolescence and adulthood. Therefore, it is essential to get help when they are young. Parent training is one of the most effective treatments available to improve behavioural issues, poor emotional regulation, academic struggles, as well as disruptive behaviour in children, especially for oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and conduct disorder (CD).

How Can Parent Training Help Parents?

Parent training can help the parents as much as it helps the children. Learning about a variety of effective parenting strategies helps reduce the amount of stressors surrounding the parents. By applying these techniques at home, parents successfully improve parent-child relationships, lower household tension, and allows for more stability in the family. In turn, the healthier home life has a positive effect on the parent’s mental health and wellbeing, as well as that of the child.

Treatment Options for Parents and Children

We believe that, especially when working with very young children, parents are a vital part of the treatment process. Treatment is always customized to your child’s age, developmental stage and family situation. Psychological intervention focuses on providing individual counselling to the child, co-counselling with the parent and child, as well as parent training to provide parents with the right skills needed to help guide your child’s healthy development.

Individual Child Counselling

Child counselling focuses on the child’s emotional, behavioural and academic wellbeing. A psychologist uses a combination of talk and play therapy techniques to help children understand, process, accept, and cope with difficult thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behaviours.
Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT)

This treatment option involves having the parents and the child attend sessions together in order to create a healthier dynamic, provide valuable skills and strategies for both parent and child, and enable parents to enact strategies at home.
Parent Management Training

Parent management training is an approach that teaches parents the skills and techniques necessary to effectively use and follow through on discipline, improve relationships with children, encourage school work and regain control of the household.