Parenting a Child Who Has Intense Emotions: Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills to Help Your Child Regulate Emotional Outbursts and Aggressive Behaviors

Temper tantrums in the supermarket. Tears that seem to come out of nowhere. Battles over homework that are more like wars. When your child has problems regulating his or her emotions, there's no hiding it. Children with intense emotions go from 0 to 100 in seconds and are prone to frequent emotional and behavioral outbursts that leave parents feeling bewildered and helpless.

Other parents may have told you that it's just a phase or that your child needs discipline. In reality, your child may have emotion dysregulation, a tendency to react intensely to situations other children take in stride. Parenting a Child Who Has Intense Emotions is an effective guide to de-escalating your child's emotions and helping your child express feelings in productive ways. You'll learn strategies drawn from dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), including mindfulness and validation skills, and practice them when your child's emotions spin out of control. This well-researched method for managing emotions can help your child make dramatic emotional and behavioral changes that both of you will be proud of.

Pat Harvey, ACSW, LCSW-C, has over thirty years of experience working with families, and now coaches parents and family members of youth and adults with emotion dysregulation using a dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) framework. She facilitates trainings and workshops for mental health professionals on DBT concepts, skills, and parent/family interventions throughout the United States and at national conferences. She is coauthor of Parenting a Child Who Has Intense Emotions, Dialectical Behavior Therapy for At-Risk Adolescents, and Hey, I'm Here Too!

Jeanine A. Penzo, LICSW, is a licensed clinical social worker with the VA Boston Healthcare System, where she utilizes dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) skills in her work with spinal-cord-injured patients and their caregivers. She is also a trained teacher who has worked with elementary and middle school students. Jeanine is the mother of three children, one of whom suffers from emotion dysregulation.