Does your child come home from school irritable, emotional, or overwhelmed, even when their teacher says they had a great day? For many children, managing the academic, social, and emotional demands of school takes more energy than we realize. By the time they get home, they may have little patience or flexibility left for even the smallest requests. Learn why after-school meltdowns happen, what they may tell us about your child's needs, and how parents can help make the transition home a little smoother.

If your child is the one in therapy, you may wonder why so much time is spent working with parents. In reality, many evidence-based treatments intentionally integrate parents because children build new skills through everyday practice, not just during therapy sessions. Learn why parent involvement is such an important part of helping children make meaningful, lasting progress.

The transition back to school can bring excitement, uncertainty, and everything in between. Whether your child is eager to return or feeling anxious about the changes ahead, parents play an important role in helping them navigate the adjustment. Learn practical strategies to support your child by validating emotions, strengthening connection, and creating a positive foundation for the new school year.

Parents often think about behavior in terms of rewards and consequences, but many daily expectations—bedtime, mealtime, screen time—aren’t about “good” or “bad” behavior at all. They’re about establishing predictable routines that help children feel secure and successfully navigate their day. Clear, consistent boundaries create structure kids can rely on, supporting emotional regulation, independence, and smoother family dynamics.

Navigating emotions can be tough — especially for kids whose brains are still developing. Children rely on the adults in their lives to act as emotional guides, helping them move through moments of stress and overwhelm: a tough school day, anxiety about an upcoming test, or the uncertainty of social relationships.

When a child has a tantrum, it is often a very stressful, loud, overwhelming event for the parent, child, and those around them. As a parent, it is easy to get frustrated, upset and lose your cool during these big moments. In order to minimize these big, instinctual reactions when children display big feelings, parents must be proactive and prepared. It’s important to be able to approach big moments being cool, calm, and collected. But how, you may ask…

Parents often wonder how to effectively promote socio-emotional resilience and high self-esteem in their children. In a world where we frequently compare ourselves to others or are being compared by others, it’s easy to feel confident about one ability while feeling discouraged about another. When thinking about facilitating your child’s positive self-talk, consider the importance of language. It’s essential to be mindful of the words we use with our children, how we express those words (e.g, tone), and what nonverbal messages we are conveying our children.

Perseverance and resilience are two terms that are often used interchangeably. The core component of both of these concepts is the idea of distress tolerance. A child’s ability to tolerate unpredictability, deal with failure, and embrace challenges all develop from their capacity to overcome obstacles to work towards a goal. Because our instinct as caregivers is to protect children from feelings of distress and failure, we frequently jump in to support the child before they have the opportunity to develop appropriate strategies or push through uncomfortable feelings to successfully deal with stressful situations on their own. While well-intentioned, this instinct does not serve to increase the child’s distress tolerance.

Being a kid is hard! They live in a world where they are constantly told what to do and most of their everyday tasks feel out of their control. Keeping this in mind can actually help you give your child more freedom, which will help them be even more independent. It’s all about picking and choosing how to direct their behavior.

Reflections are repetitions of what your child has just said. This can be a verbatim repeating of what they have shared or a summary. Using reflections during dysregulated moments helps your child to slow down their own thoughts and big feelings while also allowing them to feel heard by letting them know that you’re listening to them.

Children’s emotions typically follow a curve. They are calm, until something triggers them and their emotions intensify. If the child is unable to cope with their feelings, they reach a peak emotion, which is typically when we would see them hit, yell, kick, or cry. Sometimes, it feels like you are looking at a child you do not recognize during these peak emotions. During each stage of this curve, parents can react differently in order to minimize the size of the child’s reaction and alleviate emotional stress. In order to find what triggers big reactions in a child, parents need to be detectives.

Power struggles with children can emerge for a variety of reasons. These willful and increasingly autonomous moments are a normal part of development and typically begin around age two. When parents are confronted with navigating a newly willful toddler, they are forced to make tricky split second decisions as to how to manage a behavior, tantrum or big emotion. Fortunately, there are effective strategies to help end power struggles with your child, many of which can be simple changes in the way the parent views the child’s behavior.

Most adults haved learned to successfully integrate their “thinking brain” and “emotion brain” in a way that allows them to continue to problem solve in these moments. Kids typically haven’t yet mastered this regulatory capability. We have to help our kids learn to effectively integrate their “thinking brain” and their “emotion brain” when they’re experiencing big feelings.

Going back to school can be an exciting time for some students and their families, but can be a period of anticipation and worry for others. The latter has been the case for more students lately, as the last year and a half has changed the meaning of “back to school.” Feeling anxious about this upcoming change and the uncertainty of what school will look like this fall is typical. There are ways you can help your child cope and adjust with this upcoming change.

It’s natural and appropriate for all young children to feel separation anxiety while separating from their caregivers. Children long to be close to their caregivers and separating from them threatens their sense of security, which creates feelings of worry and distress. For some kiddos, the distress of separating from their caregiver becomes more severe, which can interfere with daily life. Often, this leaves caregivers feeling low on options and overwhelmed. Navigating separation anxiety is a balancing act of managing the child’s desire to be close while providing encouragement towards independence.

Positive parenting programs have a large and meaningful evidence-base for helping parents manage problem behaviors. However, positive parenting is not widely understood by parents. Many parents assume that positive parenting means kids can do no wrong and that we reward them anyway. In fact, positive parenting is quite different. Positive parenting actually involves relationship building, using parental attention effectively, giving kids independence, using discipline appropriately, and providing a safe, secure, and consistent environment. Once parents understand what positive parenting really is, skepticism tends to dissipate.

There are many moments throughout the day that require giving directions to kids. Parents need to make sure kids are safe, help them transition between activities, and ensure daily tasks are completed. The way we say directions or instructions matters and we want to make sure we are setting both ourselves and our kids up for success.

Parents don’t like to see kids experiencing distress and no one likes to feel uncomfortable, kids or adults! As a society, we tend to value problem-solving. Especially as a parent, the instinct is to jump in and help our kids solve a distressing emotion or experience. This instinct actually saves us from feeling distressed and, while it is well intended, deprives our child of an opportunity to develop emotion regulation strategies.

When we are faced with behavioral challenges, it is easy to see the problem, but it is much harder to see the solution. Because we see a glaring problem, we might yell “stop!” or “don’t!” to get our child to change their behavior. The truth is: we want them to stop, but we really want our kids to show a more positive behavior.

Being a parent is hard and some moments are more challenging than others. You will have many moments you are proud of and some that make you cringe. When you feel that disdain and disappointment in your own actions, what should you do?