Child behavior therapy and parent training in Coral Gables
Behavior is how a young person shows what they cannot yet say. Therapy makes the message clearer and gives parents a plan that holds up at home.
What behavior problems look like at home and at school
Tantrums, refusal, and shutdowns rarely happen at random. They cluster around the same moments: transitions, demands, tiredness, and anything too hard to do alone. Seeing that pattern is where the work starts. Guidance for parents describes how those first conversations tend to go.
Children
Meltdowns that outlast whatever set them off. Bedtime that stretches an hour. Trouble ending screen time or leaving the park. Directions ignored until the third ask. Drop off that becomes a daily struggle, and notes home about a child the parents barely recognize.
Adolescents
Arguments that escalate in seconds and end with a slammed door. Missed curfews and assignments, with a phone at the center of every conflict. Some go quiet rather than loud, avoiding school or agreeing to everything and following through on none of it.
Young adults
Follow through becomes the sticking point. Coursework, applications, and appointments get put off until they turn into emergencies. A first job or shared living brings friction over responsibilities no one spelled out, and without school's structure, days drift.
Behavior is communication, not defiance
A child who falls apart at the door is not choosing to be difficult. Behavior is the most direct language available when words and self control have not caught up yet. Each pattern is asking for something: escape from a demand, connection, predictability, or relief from a feeling too big to hold.
Dr. Wald works out what a behavior is asking for, then changes the conditions around it rather than arguing with it. Parent training is part of that, and it is not a verdict on your parenting. These are specific, learnable skills, and a good deal of what works runs against instinct.
How parent training works
Find the pattern
Dr. Wald looks closely at what happens right before a behavior and right after it. That sequence usually explains more than the behavior itself, and it points directly at what is worth changing.
Build a plan you can actually run
Clear expectations, routines that hold on a bad day, attention aimed at what is already going well, and follow through consistent enough to teach something. The plan fits your household, not an ideal one, and nothing in it depends on staying calm at the hardest moment.
Practice, adjust, extend
Parents try the plan, bring back what happened, and refine it with Dr. Wald. Where it helps, she coordinates with the school so the same expectations follow a child through the day. A first version rarely survives contact with a real week, so plans get revised as often as they need to be.
How Dr. Wald helps
Treatment is matched to a child's stage and to what a family's week actually looks like. Behavioral concerns often travel with something else, so this care sits alongside anxiety treatment and therapy after trauma. See the full range of services for everything else Dr. Wald treats.
Parent training
Structured guidance for sleep, tantrums, school refusal, separation, and noncompliance, taught to parents and practiced between sessions. Every appointment ends with something concrete to try.
CBT-informed treatment
Work with the young person on what sits underneath the behavior: frustration tolerance, problem solving, and flexibility when a plan changes.
Mindfulness and regulation
Repeatable ways to catch a feeling before it becomes a blow up, and to come back down faster once one has happened.
Motivational interviewing
For adolescents and young adults, a way to find their own reasons for change instead of borrowing a parent's.
Family systems
Roles, routines, and rules shift as children grow. Dr. Wald looks at how a household is organized so a new plan can hold.
A clearer plan for the hardest part of the day
A free 15 minute consultation is a chance to describe what has been happening and hear how Dr. Wald would approach it. In person in Coral Gables, and by telehealth across Florida, Maryland, and PSYPACT states.