Welcome to the Parenting Center

Through the SPACE program, parents of children with anxiety conditions learn supportive ways to respond to their child’s anxiety, communicate confidence in their child’s ability to manage their feelings and build ongoing independence. Parents learn problem-solving strategies in how to respond to their child’s anxious feelings and behaviors and children learn how to manage their anxiety. Research indicates that the SPACE program may reduce children’s anxiety symptoms as much as the standard individual child therapy treatment for anxiety.

Now Registering for Fall, 2020 Online Course, click here for info

This education program offers instruction in mindfulness practices including meditation and its application for reducing stress and cultivating self-compassion and quality of life for parents of children/adolescents/adults with behavior challenges and/or learning differences. The program includes didactic presentations, guided meditations and dialogue around how mindfulness can address parenting. In between classes, participants are instructed to cultivate a daily meditation practice as well as applying mindfulness to parenting and other daily activities.

Topics include:

• What is mindfulness?
• How can it help me as a parent?
• How can we better manage our own difficult emotions as parents?
• How can we move from coping to living more meaningful lives?

PMT is an evidence-based treatment aimed at reducing children’s challenging behaviors, building adaptive functioning skills, and improving the often times strained parent child relationship. These goals are achieved by active parent participation in weekly sessions where parents learn specialized skills to target problematic behaviors. Sessions involve presenting a principle or theme, discussing how it translates concretely into what to do at home (skill building), developing the use of skills at home in relation to the child’s behavior, and practice in session and outside of session.

PCIT works with parents and children together to improve the quality of the parent-child relationship and teach parents the skills necessary to manage their child’s behavior difficulties. parents learn to increase positive and supportive communication with their child and how to increase consistent and predictable parenting to address noncompliance and other disruptive behaviors. Using a one-way mirror and wireless earphone, parents are provided live coaching by a clinician on the specific skills to help shape their children’s behavior. Parents learn and practice skills during therapy until they master them, and behavior improves.

COVID-19 has impacted each of us in various ways and many have experienced new or increased challenges in their role as parents. Families are spending more time together or having to adjust to being apart. Parents are working overtime to manage their children’s emotional and behavioral ups and downs, as well as their own. This 3-part recorded webinar support series aims to support parents in Stanford's School of Medicine community with practical strategies, grounded in positive parenting principles. These strategies will encourage positive behavior, strengthen family relationships, and address challenging behavior within the current context of shelter-in-place, and beyond. We will discuss strategies for young children, middle childhood, and teens.

After watching the recorded webinar series, there may be an opportunity to continue to receive positive parenting psychoeducational support based on Parent Management Training (PMT) principles through a fee-for-service, small consultation group.