What is Dialectical Parenting?
While many adolescents find relief in gold-standard, evidence-based interventions, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) or Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), others experience symptom severity to such a degree – including OCD, ADHD, anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicidal ideation, or disordered eating – that individual therapy proves insufficient. These approaches lack guidance about how to manage the high-risk behaviors that often accompany these disorders, which both interfere with treatment and leave parents and providers feeling in the dark as to how to best triage support.
Dialectical Parenting offers a promising pathway to bridge this divide. Dialectical Parenting synthesizes two evidence-based treatment models – Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Behavior Parent Training (BPT) – to strengthen individual therapy programming and address vulnerable adolescents’ unique needs. By working directly with caregivers and collaborating with educational, medical, and mental health teams, we can strategically coordinate how a teen’s natural ecosystem responds to their symptoms, and achieve sustained, real-world progress – illustrated by improved functioning across home and school settings.
The goal of Dialectical Parenting is to help teens regulate their emotions, tolerate distress, and build a life worth living. However, rather than having caregivers act as back-seat passengers while their teen receives treatment, Dialectical Parenting puts caregivers in the driver’s seat to shape their teen’s treatment trajectory. Via this caregiver-implemented treatment approach, caregivers learn strategies including effective communication, behavior management, conflict resolution, crisis intervention, and safety planning.
Dialectical Parenting can be delivered concurrently with a teen’s individual therapy or as a foundational first step to establish therapy readiness. Once symptoms are stabilized, we find that teens are better equipped to engage in individual therapy if needed, and parents are better equipped to help their teen navigate their treatment journey, often preventing the need for higher levels of care.
