Dr. Ohad Hershkovitz

Parenting Skills for Children with Emotional/Behavioral Disorders (EBD)

Children who suffer from Conduct Disorder, ADD/ADHD, learning disabilities, emotional problems, and more will often express their distress behaviorally, as they do not possess the ability yet to verbalize their issues. Parents of such children often have a hard time dealing with their children's behavior especially when they think they are doing all they can to be supportive of the child. However, in certain circumstances parents must adopt new strategies in order to decrease inappropriate behaviors or to prevent a deterioration of the child's mood or risk long-term emotional problems.

• Parents of EBD children may have significant stress, psychopathology, and/or poor parenting skills
• EBD children contribute greatly to parental stress and disturbed parent-child relationships
• Parenting styles characteristic of EBD parents predict long term negative outcomes
• Parenting mediates most negative outcomes and needs to be the main focus of intervention

Behavioral Therapy

Behavioral Coaching focuses on developing appropriate parenting skills which can provide the proper framework for a child to adapt to his environment. A healthier structure will help an EBD child learn to better direct his behaviors, as well as decreasing emotional distress for both the child and the parents. Skills such as appropriate rules, enforcing rules, appropriate responses, appropriate commands, daily charts, parent consistency and increasing responsibility are developed and practiced both in and out of the sessions.