What is PCIT?
Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) is an evidence-based treatment for young challenging children (2-7) with behavioral problems. PCIT is done through “live coaching.” During your session, you and your child are in a playroom while the therapist is in an observation room. The therapist will watch you interact with your child and coach you on skills you are learning to manage your child’s behavior. PCIT routinely receives the highest rating for the quality of research that has been done demonstrating its efficacy. PCIT is often 14-25 sessions. Sessions are weekly for it’s duration.
You receive step-by-step, live coaching during sessions with your child to learn positive and effective parenting strategies that decrease aggressive, defiant and other negative behaviors.
The first part of treatment focuses on building a secure relationship between you and your child. The first part of PCIT called, “Child Directed Interaction” or CDI focuses on increasing warmth in your relationship with your child through learning and applying skills proven to help children feel calm, secure in their relationships with their parents, and good about themselves.
During the second part of PCIT called Parent Directed Interaction or PDI, you will learn proven strategies to help your child accept your limits, comply with your directions, respect house rules, and demonstrate appropriate behavior in public.
PCIT helps with:
• Improved child pro-social skills
• Decreased child negative behaviors
• Improved child compliance
• Improved positive parenting strategies
• Reduced parenting stress
• Improvement in trauma symptoms
• Improvement in attention
• Reduction in child maltreatment re-occurrence
• Improvement in maternal depression
• Improvement in school behaviors
• Improvement in untreated siblings
• Improvement in speech-language skills
The goals of treatment are:
• Strengthening the parent/caregiver-child
relationship
• Improvement in child’s pro-social behaviors
• Decrease in child’s negative behaviors
• Improvement in frustration tolerance and anger
management
• Decrease in parenting stress
Call 269-615-7637 to see if you and your child might be a good fit for PCIT.
