My Child is Having Behavior Problems. What Can I Do?
Should I Go to Therapy, or Should My Child?
Being a parent is so hard. We have to balance several roles in one day, let alone one hour.
While playing chauffeur to your 10 year old and driving them to piano lessons, you're playing therapist to your 12 year old as you listen to them talk about a conflict with a friend.
As you are the chef and prepping dinner, you are also a referee as your 5 and 7 year olds fight over the Magnatiles.
By the time you sit down for dinner, you've made a hundred small decisions no one will ever thank you for. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, you're also trying to keep track of how your child is doing - really doing - underneath the surface.
Maybe it looks like this: you ask your child to put their shoes on for the third time, and instead of moving, they collapse on the floor in tears. Or your child snaps at their sibling over something small, then spirals into "I'm the worst" when you point it out. Or bedtime, which used to be simple, has turned into forty-five minutes of negotiating, stalling, and tears.
You leave those moments wondering: is this normal? Is this me? Is this them?
Many of the parents we work with - a lot of them women navigating the mental load of the household - are asking this exact question for the first time. If you're considering counseling or therapy for yourself or your child, you're not overreacting. You're paying attention.
On top of all of that you are noticing your child is struggling. You might notice
Irritability - easily getting angry
Difficulty separating from you
Easily dysregulated
Having trouble with transitions
Crying easily when told they made a mistake
Not following directions
Upset when something is not "perfect" or doesn't go their way
You want the best for your child (you wouldn't be reading this if you didn't), so you are ready to find your child a therapist or counselor - someone who specializes in child mental health.
But wait.
It might be best for YOU to see a therapist or counselor first.
Let me explain.
Why Parents Might Need Therapy First
Your child's experiences and behaviors are not isolated from you. They are interwoven with yours. If you are often anxious, your child is more likely to develop anxiety of their own. If you are often irritable or low, your child is likely to mirror that irritability or even show early signs of depression. Mental health, in a family, is rarely just one person's issue.
Children learn from what they see and what they experience.
When you notice a behavior you are concerned about in your child, ask yourself,
Where are they seeing something similar?
When do they see me (or their other caregiver) with a similar feeling?
How do I respond when my child is in distress?
How do I respond when I am in distress?
This isn't about blame.
Almost every parent has a moment where they hear their own parent's words come out of their mouth. That's not a character flaw. It's how families work - patterns get passed down until someone decides to look at them closely enough to change.
And here's the part that's easy to miss in the busyness of daily life:
Your child doesn't need you to be calm all the time. They need to see what happens after you're not calm.
Do you repair? Do you name what happened? Do you show them that big feelings can be worked through instead of just survived? That's the real curriculum kids are learning from, far more than any single meltdown or mistake.
What Changes When You Do the Work First
Here's the part that surprises a lot of parents: therapy for you doesn't mean waiting to help your child. It's often the fastest way to help them.
Kids co-regulate off of us before they can regulate on their own. Your nervous system is the model their nervous system is learning from. When you're able to stay calmer in the chaos, your child borrows that calm. When you're reactive, they borrow that too - not because they're copying you on purpose, but because that's how young nervous systems learn.
So when you go to therapy, you're not skipping your child's needs. You're addressing them at the source.
In your own sessions, you might work on:
Noticing your own triggers before you react to your child's behavior
Learning to pause instead of matching your child's intensity
Understanding what your own childhood taught you about conflict, mistakes, and big feelings
Building a toolkit you can actually use in the moment - not just in theory
Processing your own unresolved trauma or PTSD, if that's part of what's underneath your reactivity
For parents whose triggers seem to run deeper than day-to-day stress - especially if there's a history of trauma - a specialist trained in approaches like EMDR or Brainspotting can help. These are therapy modalities designed to help the nervous system actually release old patterns, not just understand them intellectually. Traditional talk therapy and counseling help many parents, but for some, EMDR or Brainspotting gets to the root faster.
None of this makes you a bad parent for needing support. It makes you a parent who's willing to look at the whole picture, not just the part that's easiest to point to.
Here's what that can look like in practice. Say your child refuses to get in the car for the fifth day in a row, and you feel that familiar surge of frustration rising in your chest. Before therapy, that surge might turn into raised voices, or a threat you don't really mean, or a tense, silent car ride. After doing some of this work, that same surge can become a pause - just a beat - where you notice the feeling, name it to yourself, and choose a different response. Maybe you crouch down. Maybe you say, "This is hard for both of us right now." Maybe you just breathe before you speak.
That pause doesn't happen because you read about it. It happens because you've practiced it - with a therapist, in a space where someone helps you understand why that surge shows up in the first place, and what it's protecting you from.
Parents often come into this work expecting to talk exclusively about their child. What tends to happen instead is they start to see their own history more clearly - how they were parented, what they learned to do with big feelings as a kid, what they swore they'd never repeat. That understanding doesn't just sit there as insight. It changes what happens the next time your child melts down in the cereal aisle.
When Your Child Still Needs Their Own Therapist
To be clear - this isn't an either/or. Sometimes a child's struggles go beyond what's happening at home. Trauma, PTSD, anxiety, depression, ADHD, learning differences, grief, big life transitions - these often need their own dedicated support from a child therapist or specialist, alongside the work you're doing.
For younger children especially, that support often looks different from traditional talk therapy. Play therapy - where a trained child therapist uses play as the language kids naturally use to process feelings - can help children work through anxiety, trauma, or big transitions in a way that feels safe and age-appropriate. Some child specialists also use approaches like EMDR with kids, particularly when there's a specific traumatic event involved.
A good sign it's time for your child to have their own therapist too:
The behaviors persist even as your own patterns shift
Your child is asking for help or clearly wants to talk to someone
There's a specific event or diagnosis at play
The behaviors are affecting school, friendships, or your child's sense of self
Working on yourself first isn't about replacing your child's care. It's about making sure the foundation underneath them is steady - so that whatever support they get, individual or family-based, actually has room to work.
If You're Feeling Guilty Right Now, You're Not Alone
A lot of parents read something like this and feel a wave of guilt. Is this my fault? Did I cause this?
That's a natural reaction, but it's not a helpful one, and it's not really the point. Guilt tends to make us defensive or stuck, while accountability - a much gentler, more useful cousin of guilt - makes us curious. Accountability says, "I might have played a part in this pattern, and I'm allowed to change it." Guilt says, "I've already failed," and then goes quiet.
You are not the sole author of your child's struggles. Genetics, temperament, school, friendships, and a dozen other factors are all in the mix too. But you are one of the most powerful, most consistent influences in your child's life - which is actually good news. It means you have real leverage here. You don't have to wait for your child to change first.
You Don't Have to Figure This Out Alone
If you've read this far, you're already doing the hardest part - looking honestly at your own role instead of looking away from it. That takes real courage.
You don't need to have it all figured out before you reach out. And if this is your first time in therapy, know that our counselors and therapists meet you exactly where you are - no judgment, no pressure to have the right words.
At Conscious Roots Counseling, we offer two ways to get parenting support, depending on what you need:
Individual therapy with Jenny is focused on you - your history, your patterns, and how they show up in your parenting. Jenny specializes in helping parents heal intergenerational trauma and uses approaches like EMDR and Brainspotting alongside talk therapy. She also has a specialized interest in supporting parents of neurodivergent children.
Parent collaboration with Megan is focused on your child's specific behaviors and what's underneath them. Megan works with parents raising kids with big emotions, challenging behaviors, anxiety, ADHD, trauma, or sensory differences - whether or not your child is also seeing her for play therapy.
Not sure which one fits? You don't have to know before you reach out. Learn more about our parenting support options and we'll help match you with the right therapist or counselor for your family.
Ready to take the first step? Reach out and let's talk about what's happening in your family.
Written by Jenny Liu, LPCC-S
Owner and Therapist at Conscious Roots Counseling
You can email her: jenny@conscious-roots.com
