This chapter examines interventions that focus on parent emotion regulation (ER). Emotions, their function, the different pathways via which emotions are generated, and the role of ER are all briefly introduced to provide the context for the way interventions efforts are considered in the chapter. Interventions that focus on ER in adults drawn from different theoretical perspectives are examined in order to review key common effective components. This is followed by a review of approaches to parent ER used in parenting interventions. We then outline how our own Tuning in to Kids suite of parenting programs targets parent ER. This includes a focus on building parent emotion awareness; promoting insight into parent’s meta-emotion beliefs (how they feel about emotions) and the impact of family of origin experiences on how parents react to emotions; teaching parents proactive, top-down, and bottom-up ER strategies; and how a focus on learning emotion coaching with their children has the added bonus of often enhancing parent ER.

In this chapter we outline how an emotion coaching approach to working with parents can be used in child and adolescent mental health work. In particular, we describe the theory and empirical research in relation to parent emotion socialization (i.e., parent emotion regulation, reactions to children’s emotions and emotion coaching) and how we have used this theory in an evidence-based intervention called Tuning in to Kids (TIK). Then, using our TIK approach to teaching emotion coaching, we provide detail about how components or steps of emotion coaching can be used in clinical work, explore barriers and challenges that are often encountered in using these and outline a case study to illustrate the main principles. A discussion is also included about addressing the emotion competence of parents in a parallel process that is important to include alongside the parenting skills. Lastly, we discuss how factors within both the clinician and the service system contribute to effective application of this emotion-focused approach to parenting intervention.

Parents play a critical role in helping children learn to manage their emotions. In this chapter, we describe a promising new emotion coaching (EC) parenting intervention for survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) targeting parent and child emotion regulation skills and parent-child relationships. We provide an overview of the EC intervention developed for this at-risk population, outline its key elements and use preliminary pilot data to illustrate how such a behavioural intervention can yield improvements in behavioural and physiological indices of emotion regulation (i.e., respiratory sinus arrhythmia [RSA]) and parent-child relationships and reductions in mental health difficulties in IPV-exposed mothers and their children. We also provide a clinical case example to illustrate the EC treatment principles and process, identify several core competencies that enhance delivery and outcomes of the EC intervention and consider potential directions for future work on EC.