Although the therapeutic effectiveness of behavioral approaches to group parent programs in reducing child disruptive behavior has been established, about a third of all families do not benefit from participating. Because unhealthy/maladaptive emotions seem to be a primary reason why adults fail to engage in correct parenting practices and fail to benefit from behavioral parent programs, the key would be to bring together the cognitive and behavioral models of self-regulation to improve the outcomes of parental interventions for child disruptive behavior. Research in cognitive science (see David, 2004) seems to support the idea that both cognitive and behavioral elements need to be implemented in a structured way in parent programs, and focus should change from parental cold cognitions, which do not automatically result in parents' emotional response unless appraised, to hot parental cognitions. This article proposes changes in parenting interventions for child externalizing behavior based on advances in cognitive behavioral theory (CBT).Keywords: cognitive behavioral parent program; child disruptive behavior; parental distress; cold and hot cognitions B ecause there is no state license required, we are rarely trained in the most important task of our lives, namely, raising our children. It is widely accepted (see Children's Law OfficeBeebe James) that adult parenting behaviors are modeled based on parents' childhood experience, and that both positive and negative family experiences while growing up have a direct impact on the attitudes and practices parents will use in raising their own children. When using

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Although parent cognitions are considered important predictors that determine specific emotional reactions and parental practices, models on the cognitive strategies for regulating parental distress or positive emotions are not well developed. Our aim was to investigate the nature of cognitions involved in parental distress and satisfaction, in terms of their specificity (parental or general) and their processing levels (inferential or evaluative cognitions). We hypothesized that parent's specific evaluative cognitions will mediate the impact of more general and inferential cognitive structures on their affective reactions. We used bootstrapping procedures in order to test the mediation models proposed. Results obtained show indeed that rather specific evaluative parental cognitions are mediating the relationship between general cognitions and parental distress. In terms of the cognitive processing levels, it seems that when parents hold both low self-efficacy and parental negative global evaluations for the self/child, this adds significantly to their distress.

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