Disruptive Behaviors
- Are you having difficulty controlling your child’s behavior at home?
- Are you getting reports from school that your child is acting out in class?
What are Disruptive Behaviors?
Disruptive behaviors can look different for each child. However, challenging behaviors can get in the way of a child’s functioning at school and home and impact the relationships your child develops. Disruptive behaviors may include the following: tantrums or meltdowns, yelling, screaming, physical or verbal aggression, property destruction. Most children experiencing these symptoms are struggling with knowing how to regulate their emotions. An inability to regulate oneself emotionally can lead to ongoing challenges as your child grows.
Treatment for Disruptive Behaviors and Emotional Regulation
Wellspring offers many options for supporting families, caregivers, children, and other professionals with managing problem behaviors and teaching emotional regulation skills. Our therapists will meet with both parents and your child over several sessions to conduct a thorough assessment of the problem. Ongoing treatment recommendations may include one-on-one therapy for your child, parent sessions to support you as parents with responding to the behavior, consultation with your child’s educational team, and/or in-home/in-school therapy. Behavior treatment can support the whole family system with learning tools and strategies for preventing the problem behavior, managing the behavior when it occurs, and providing emotional support for all members involved.
Our therapists are available to provide behavior treatment to children as young as four up through the teen years. We are here to support you and your child with each stage of development to help your child develop emotional regulation skills, learn healthy coping strategies, and process difficult emotions in a safe environment.
When is it time to seek help?
This will vary for each individual child and family and how severe or difficult the behavior is to manage. With problem behaviors, the earlier the behavior is addressed the better. Intervention for problem behaviors at an early stage can prevent escalation to larger issues in the future. Even if your child is not motivated to work on addressing the issue, a therapist can provide consultation to you as parents to support you with coping and responding to the behavior.