The Emotionally Intelligent Child

Mariza Quezada is a clinical child psychologist and parenting educator with over eighteen years of experience working with children, adolescents, and families. She earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, and completed her clinical training at the Yale Child Study Center, where she specialized in early childhood emotional development and parent-child interaction therapy.

Dr. Quezada currently serves as the Director of Family Emotional Health at the Center for Child and Family Well-Being in Portland, Oregon, where she leads programs focused on social-emotional learning, trauma-informed parenting, and school-based mental health support. She has developed emotional intelligence curricula used in over two hundred elementary schools across the Pacific Northwest and has trained thousands of educators and mental health professionals in evidence-based approaches to supporting children's emotional development.

Her writing has appeared in *Psychology Today*, *Parenting Science*, and the *Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry*, where her research on emotion coaching in early childhood has been cited extensively by fellow practitioners and researchers. She speaks regularly at national conferences on topics including emotional regulation, resilience-building, and the neuroscience of parent-child attachment.

Dr. Quezada is the mother of two children, ages eleven and fourteen, who provide her with daily hands-on research into the gap between theory and practice. She lives in Portland with her family and a remarkably intuitive rescue dog named Beans, who has never once lost his emotional composure, even when the toast burns.

Readers can connect with Dr. Quezada through her website at marizaquezada.com, where she offers additional resources, a monthly newsletter on emotional intelligence in family life, and updates on her speaking schedule and workshops.