Parent-Child Interaction Therapy
LIVE DIRECTED SUPPORT TO RESPOND AND ENGAGE COMPASSIONATELY
When young children engage in disruptive behaviors, sometimes that behavior can be enough to disrupt a caregiver’s own ability to know how to access a compassionate, useful response in the moment. Do you ever wish you had someone in your ear to help you figure out what to do next with your child in similar moments?
Through a form of live coaching therapy, Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, or PCIT, can offer that support by helping guide caregivers to engage with their children from a place of consistency, clarity, and emotional regulation.
Using PCIT, you can strengthen your relationship with your child while you get new strategies to navigate hard-to-manage behaviors with more insight and deeper skills. Throughout the therapy process, you will gain skills to act and respond from a more regulated place and learn how to positively shape your child’s choices, actions, and impulses.
What is Parent-Child Interaction Therapy?
Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) is an evidence-based intervention developed by Sheila Eyeberg to treat disruptive behaviors in young children by strengthening the caregiver-child relationship and teaching effective caregiving strategies through live parent coaching. During the live coaching sessions, the caregiver-child dyad plays and interacts while the therapist watches and coaches from an observation room using a “bug-in-the-ear” device, or online using wireless earbuds.
As the caregiver, you are the therapeutic intervention itself, learning to build warmth and security in your relationship with yourself and your child so you can feel confident and well-equipped to manage disruptive behaviors outside of therapy.
Some of the potential outcomes for behavior and child wellbeing can come from PCIT include:
Lessening the frequency and severity of tantrums and meltdowns
Decreasing the frequency and severity of aggressive behaviors
Increasing compliance and decreasing defiance and opposition, while still encouraging your child’s inherent sense of self and autonomy
Less frustration because fewer difficult-to-manage behaviors need to be addressed
Better understanding for how to navigate challenging behaviors
Greater security between your child and you in your relationship
Decreasing attention-seeking behaviors
Increasing your child’s attention span
Strengthening your child’s social skills, including the ability to share and empathize with others
Families will naturally benefit from all of the above being addressed, and caregivers also have the potential to benefit from:
Increased confidence in your caregiving abilities
Reduce overall household stress
Who is PCIT for?
If your child is 2-7 years old and your family wants new tools to approach hard-to-manage disruptive behaviors, Parent-Child Interaction Therapy might be right for you and your child.
Children who display any of the following behaviors may benefit from PCIT (and have families that can benefit too):
Refusal and defiance of adult requests
Emotional dysregulation
Low frustration tolerance
Vindictiveness
Frequent tantrums or meltdowns
Quick loss of temper
Aggressive behaviors toward people, animals, or property
Difficulty taking turns and playing calmly
Inattention and hyperactivity
PCIT has been shown to be an effective treatment for children diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), intermittent explosive disorder (IED), selective mutism, other disruptive behavior disorders (DBDs), and autism spectrum disorders (ASD).
PCIT is often used for families who have recently adopted or reunified with their child.
PCIT has been recognized as a trauma-informed intervention by the National Child Traumatic Stress Network and has been found to be effective for trauma-exposed children.
Services
Ensemble Therapy provides one-on-one structured play therapy sessions that focus on the caregiver and one child for the entirety of the session, with the adult (you!) receiving live in-ear coaching.
At Ensemble Therapy, our remote approach allows families to receive in-home therapy through an internet connection, what’s known as I-PCIT, or internet-based PCIT. Sessions take place through an internet-connected device such as a computer, tablet, or phone, and a pair of wireless earbuds or headphones, with you and your child in your own home and your therapist observing from the office. If you have any questions, your therapist can discuss the tech set up with you so you can feel confident to focus more on your child and less on your device on the day of.
An upside of the remote treatment is the ability to be in the comfort of your own home for both your sake and your child’s, and research shows this modality gives comparable or better outcomes compared to in-office PCIT!
Parent-Child Interaction Therapy Session, 50 minutes, $225
Families will attend therapy sessions once a week, and as part of the treatment process, you will practice your caregiver skills daily for 5 minutes while spending time with your child. This small consistency adds up!
How does the process work?
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How does the process work? ♡
Step 1: FREE 15-MINUTE PHONE CALL
The process begins with a free, 15-minute phone consultation with you to discuss your general questions and concerns. This is not a time where we will assess your child’s specific needs, but rather to help you decide if this is the right therapeutic modality for your family at this time. Then, to ensure PCIT is a fit for you and your child, you’ll complete an intake and observation session, as well as complete assessments, with your therapist.
Step 2: INTAKE AND OBSERVATION
We will go over detailed background information about your child and family, discuss potential aims of support, review practice policies, and set goals for your family’s therapeutic work. You’ll be asked about your child’s background, challenges, functional skills, and have the opportunity to ask questions, as well as complete assessments.
Step 3: PHASE ONE TREATMENT
CHILD-DIRECTED INTERACTION (CDI)
Each weekly treatment session is 60 minutes long. The first phase of treatment is based on child-directed interaction, which creates conditions that can soothe and lessen attention-seeking behaviors, lengthen attention span, strengthen social skills like sharing, and lessen the frequency and severity of tantrums.
With the foundation of this supportive environment, children can learn to hear and feel heard, and caregivers can learn what they need to listen and be able to respond. The combination results in greater confidence in your caregiving abilities and approach, lessening parental frustration because there’s less to be frustrated about to begin with, and knowing how to navigate it when it is present.
Step 4: PHASE TWO TREATMENT
PARENT-DIRECTED INTERACTION (PDI)
When the frustration does still come from time to time, you can draw on what they learn in the second phase of treatment to recognize and know how to navigate it. This phase is based on parent-directed interaction, which gives caregivers strategies to effectively, calmly, and confidently manage children’s most challenging behaviors.
During this phase, you will implement techniques that teach your child to follow instructions, respect boundaries and limits, and display appropriate behaviors both at home and in public. This phase of treatment works to decrease the frequency and severity of aggressive behaviors, increase compliance, decrease defiance and opposition, and further increase your ability to manage your child’s challenging and disruptive behaviors.
Step 5: ASSESS TREATMENT OUTCOMES
Though treatment is not time-limited, PCIT can be completed in 14-20 sessions with consistent attendance and homework completion. Treatment is not considered complete until you reach and maintain caregiving skills from both phases of treatment, your parental ratings of your child’s behavior are within normal limits on a behavior rating scale, and you report feeling confident using the skills learned in PCIT in real-life situations.
Our Approach
Using the live coaching element to support how caregivers implement specific skills in the moment is what makes PCIT different from other therapeutic modalities, but at Ensemble we always keep one thing the same: all of our therapy operates from a trauma-informed, human-first approach. How our therapists interact with your and your child is grounded in the reality of family dynamics just as much as it’s grounded in a research-based understanding of child development, psychology, education, kinesiology, and biology and research-backed intervention strategies.
Your therapist will meet you and your child where you are on the day of your session — even if that means tantrums, tears, or crossed wires — and they’ll hold a potential future in mind for your family that includes easier interactions at the same time.
You’ll have an ally that validates the difficulties you experience trying to manage tough behavior, and they will help hold up a mirror to show how far you and your child have come along the way. Your child will get that ally too even when they don’t know it through having a well-supported parent who can see them, their needs, and how to respond with the best clarity available to them.
READY TO FIND OUT IF PCIT IS RIGHT
FOR YOUR FAMILY?
Meet Our Therapist for PCIT
Kaylyn Evans, MA, LPC , RPT™, NCC
(She/Her/Hers)
Learning Center Coordinator
Kaylyn Evans is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC), Registered Play Therapist (RPT™) and Nationally Certified Counselor (NCC). She earned her Bachelor’s Degree at Southwestern University in Biology and Psychology and her Master’s Degree in Professional Counseling at Texas State University. Kaylyn is currently working towards her certification in Parent-Child Interaction Therapy. Kaylyn’s goal is to provide trauma-informed, anti-racist, and LGBTQIA+ affirming counseling at all times. Kaylyn has experience working with children, adolescents, and families in a variety of settings including elementary school and community agencies.
She provides counseling from a prescriptive perspective using evidence-based practices including Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Solution Focused Therapy, and expressive modalities such as play, art and sand tray. Kaylyn has speciality training in Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), a therapy geared toward increasing parent confidence and enhancing children’s emotion regulation, and Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE), a therapy designed to work with parents only to address the effect of anxiety and OCD on families. She works closely with families to help create an individualized plan to meet their needs. Kaylyn has experience working with anxiety, depression, ADHD, parenting skills, emotion regulation, adjustment issues, and externalizing behaviors like tantrums and big emotions.