Trauma-Informed Parenting Program

The proposed book will be a guide for mental health clinicians (that is, mental health counselors, social workers, and psychologists) who work with children and families who have been affected by trauma and adversity (collectively known as adverse childhood experiences [ACEs]). The book will be specifically tailored to practitioners who want to directly intervene with parents and who want practical, hands-on strategies for teaching parents how to foster their children's emotional development. The proposed book will build upon the successes of traditional parenting programs by offering strategies and tools for clinicians to teach parents how to improve their children's emotion regulation skills. Fundamentally, emotion regulation is an adaptive process bywhich emotions are monitored, evaluated, and modified to accomplish one's goals or to meet the demands of the present environment. Scientific studies have shown that emotion regulation is vital for healthy psychological and social development and is a critical life skill that predicts positive long-term outcomes. However, parent training manuals that are currently available do not focus on emotion regulation. Thus, the proposed book will specifically address emotion regulation and how parents can best help and support their children's emotion regulation development. Given that children who have been affected by trauma and adversity experience emotion dysregulation as a primary problem, a book that targets emotion regulation is not only timely, but greatly needed--