Parenting Support

The Peaceful Home Program

The Peaceful Home program is a signature offering of Chicago Psychotherapy, developed by our clinical director, Dr. Caroline Adelman. It is an 8-session evidence-based group program for parents and caregivers that integrates the most effective elements from leading parenting interventions — including Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), Parent Management Training (PMT), SPACE, and the co-regulation research — into a single, cohesive framework designed to help families build calmer, more connected homes.

The program is built around a core insight from developmental science: children develop the capacity to regulate their own emotions, behavior, and attention through the supportive guidance of the adults around them. This process — called co-regulation — is the foundation of healthy self-regulation. When parents understand how co-regulation works and learn to apply it intentionally, the daily dynamics of family life begin to shift.

The Peaceful Home program moves through four phases:

Understanding Co-Regulation

Parents learn what co-regulation is, why it matters across developmental stages, and how their child’s specific regulatory needs show up in everyday life.

Caregiver Self-Regulation

Before you can co-regulate with your child, you need to be able to manage your own emotional responses — especially in high-stress parenting moments. This phase helps parents understand their own emotional triggers, vulnerabilities, and automatic thought patterns, and build practical strategies for staying grounded when things get intense. Drawing on CBT principles, parents learn to recognize the thinking traps that escalate conflict and practice intentional responding instead of reactive parenting.

Strengthening The Parent-Child Relationship.

Using elements from PCIT (including Special Time and the PRIDE skills — Praise, Reflect, Imitate, Describe, Enjoy), parents learn to build warmth, connection, and positive attention into their daily interactions. This phase also focuses on emotion coaching — learning to accept and name a child’s feelings rather than inadvertently dismissing them — which strengthens the child’s emotional vocabulary and trust in the relationship.

Structuring The Environment For Success

Parents learn to set clear, developmentally appropriate expectations, use positive reinforcement strategically (including labeled praise and reward systems), deliver effective commands, and apply consistent consequences when needed — including planned ignoring and time-out procedures grounded in behavioral research. The emphasis is always on increasing positive behavior rather than punishing negative behavior.

The Peaceful Home program is offered as a group workshop series and is suitable for parents and caregivers of children across a wide age range. It is especially well-suited for families dealing with behavioral challenges, emotional dysregulation, parent-child conflict, or the general stress of managing a busy household with young or school-age children.

SPACE (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions)

For families where child or adolescent anxiety is the primary concern, we offer SPACE — an evidence-based parent treatment developed at the Yale Child Study Center by Dr. Eli Lebowitz. All of our clinicians are trained in this approach.

SPACE is grounded in a powerful finding from the research: when parents change how they respond to a child’s anxiety, the child’s anxiety improves — even without the child being in direct treatment. The program works by helping parents identify the ways they have been accommodating their child’s anxiety (answering reassurance questions, helping with avoidance, adjusting family routines) and gradually reduce those accommodations while increasing supportive, confidence-building responses.

SPACE is a structured, typically 8–12 session program. It can be used as a standalone parent-based treatment or alongside the child’s individual therapy. It is particularly helpful when a child is reluctant to engage in their own therapy, when family accommodation patterns have become deeply entrenched, or when parents want a direct, active role in their child’s recovery.

Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT)

PCIT is a highly structured, evidence-based treatment for young children (typically ages 2–7) with behavioral and emotional difficulties. It is unique in that the therapist coaches the parent in real time — often through a one-way mirror or earpiece — while the parent interacts with their child. PCIT moves through two phases: a relationship-strengthening phase (Child-Directed Interaction) focused on building warmth and positive attention, followed by a discipline phase (Parent-Directed Interaction) focused on effective limit-setting and consistent follow-through. PCIT has a strong evidence base for reducing oppositional behavior, tantrums, aggression, and parent-child conflict, and for building more positive, connected family relationships.

Parent Management Training (PMT)

PMT is an evidence-based approach that teaches parents specific behavioral strategies — positive reinforcement, effective commands, consistent consequences, and structured routines — to reduce problematic behavior and increase prosocial behavior in children and adolescents. PMT is grounded in decades of research on learning and behavior, and it is one of the most well-supported interventions in child clinical psychology. It is appropriate for a wide range of concerns, including defiance, aggression, noncompliance, and difficulty with self-regulation. Our clinicians tailor PMT to each family’s specific situation, values, and goals.

Individual Parent Coaching

In addition to our structured programs, we offer individualized parent coaching for families who want tailored guidance on specific challenges. Whether you are navigating a new diagnosis, managing school-related concerns, supporting a child through a transition, or simply looking for more effective strategies for the daily struggles that come with parenting, our clinicians can help. Parent coaching sessions are collaborative, practical, and focused on giving you tools you can use immediately.