How do you decide whether to seek professional help in dealing with a child’s misbehavior? Families come to the Yale Parenting Center and Child Conduct Clinic because they were referred by a school official or a pediatrician, because Family Services or a judge ordered them to, or because the parents decided on their own that they needed help managing their children’s behavior. Even if parents are inclined to let a problem fade away on its own, and even if it’s likely to, they’re not always in a position to wait for nature to take its course

Thanks to more than 50 years of research, we know how to change children’s behavior. In brief, you identify the unwanted behavior, define its positive opposite (the desirable behavior you want to replace it with), and then make sure that your child engages in a lot of reinforced practice of the new behavior until it replaces the unwanted one. Reinforced practice means that you pay as much attention as possible to the positive opposite so that your child falls into a pattern: Do the right behavior, get a reward (praise or a token); do the behavior, get a reward. 

If you’re a parent, you are probably familiar with being provoked into a blood vessel-popping rage that instantly overwhelms any resolution you might have made to stay calm. That’s because kids are amazingly good at refining behaviors that they can turn to when they’re upset or angry, especially in public, to make their parents even angrier—in fact, insanely angry. Let’s just stand back for a moment and appreciate the virtuosity of the 6-year-old who trails along behind you every morning on the way to school wailing that you’re mean because you make him wear an uncomfortable backpack or wrinkly socks, or the 9-year-old who demonstrates her budding independence and wit by being rude to you in front of others.

The best sellers would have you believe that timeout is a time for your child to think about what he did wrong. But Kazdin says that timeout is simply a period of time in which access to reinforcement is brief. One minute  is plenty, he says. Even five minutes is fine. It was never designed to be an exile to Siberia.

Forget everything you've ever heard about how to deal with kids' bad behavior. According to this leading child psychologist, you don't have to get tough to discipline your kid properly.

For those times when your kid goes from zero to possessed in 60 seconds—and you feel like you're yelling at 160 decibels—a top psychologist offers some soothing (and surprising) advice. 

Alan Kazdin, Ph.D. outlines strategies gleaned from his work with thousands of patients—and offers hope to beleaguered  parents everywhere. Here, he helps Cookie staffers with their own disciplining dilemmas. Find  out more specific information on the Kazdin Method.

In this day of two­ earner couples and single parents, when 9­ year­ olds have cellphones, 12 ­year­ olds are binge drinking and having oral sex, and there is evidence that teens are more fearful and  depressed than ever, the challenges of rearing competent and loving human beings are  enough to make a parent seek help from Super nanny.

Deciding how to discipline a child can be one of the hardest parts of being a parent. Even parents of generally well-behaved children can find themselves at a loss when trying to discipline a defiant toddler or a surly teenager. In this episode, psychologist Alan Kazdin, PhD, discusses corporal punishment and the most effective techniques for getting the behavior parents want.

Parents grappling with how to change the behavior of a defiant tantrum-prone child often turn in frustration to books for help, with mixed results.