Parenting Therapy

There’s no instruction manual for parenthood and it can be a profoundly challenging experience. We do our very best to give our children what they need. But sometimes, we are at a loss for how to support and help them.

Maybe you have a fussy baby and you are overwhelmed trying to keep her calm or you have a preschooler who is hitting and biting their classmates or sibling. Perhaps you have a school age child who is having meltdowns before school or a teenager who fights with you at every turn.

When most of us become parents, we expect that we will have a child who thinks and acts in ways that we can understand and respond to effectively. But children can be confounding creatures who have a way of setting off our own emotions, which can get in the way of our ability to see what they need.

I work with parents to help them learn how to understand and manage their child’s difficult behavior and to create a more connected, calm family life. Here are some common challenges that lead parents to reach out to me:

• New parents feeling overwhelmed. Keeping another human alive while maintaining your own sense of self and wellbeing is challenging. Many new parents struggle with uncomfortable emotions, including anxiety and frustration. If you didn’t like how you were parented, you may worry about your own ability to parent effectively.  

• Managing defiant behavior. When a toddler and preschooler bites and hits, it can be scary. When a teen fights you at every turn, it can feel like you aren’t able to do anything right. When your child just won’t listen to you, it can be deeply frustrating. In all these cases it’s easy to get sucked into a power struggle with your child. There are better ways to manage defiant behavior.      

• Managing meltdowns. Some kids get overwhelmed easily and have frequent meltdowns. Often these meltdowns happen over transitions: bedtime, going to school, coming home from school, etc. As a parent, your goal isn’t to keep your child from melting down, but to support them in learning to manage and understand their feelings.

• Managing procrastination. How do you get your child to do chores or homework or to follow directions? Some kids need special support from their parents to learn how to get things done and pay attention.  

• Parental emotional reactivity. When our kids push our buttons, our emotional reactions can be swift, strong and overwhelming. The problem-solving part of the brain shuts down and the fight/flight part of our brain takes over, causing us to have responses that aren’t helpful. I work with parents to reduce their emotional reactivity so that they can stay present and support their kids even when their kids are doing the damnedest things.

• Couples with different parenting styles. How we were raised informs how we parent and you have had different experiences than your partner. It’s important that you find ways to discuss your differences in a collaborative way. Children will try to play you off one another to get what they want, but they need you to be unified even when you disagree.

• Step-parenting and blending families.  Remarriage and blending families bring up a unique set of challenges.  Stepping into a new role in a child’s life can be a delicate endeavor and children often push back on the new authority. 

Parenting Therapy: My Approach

Parenting therapy is built around the idea that children thrive when their parents are present and able to respond to their needs in a way that helps them grow. In this crazy modern world, it’s hard for parents to know how to do that, especially if their own childhood was difficult. The tendency will be to unconsciously act like your parents did or to overcorrect in counterproductive ways (e.g. failing to set appropriate boundaries in response to your parents being overly strict).

I work with individual parents and couples to help them teach their children how to manage their emotions and navigate the frustrations and disappointments that are a part of life. Nobody—not a therapist or teacher—will be able to know your child and support them better than you. But sometimes parents need to develop new understandings and skills. And often they need support themselves.

In our sessions, we’ll look at what’s going on in the dynamic between you and your child and what happens when things go sideways. I draw upon my experience as a child therapist combined with an understanding of brain development to provide insight into what might be going on and collaborate with you to come up with approaches that work for your family.

I’ll both problem solve and help you deepen your understanding of your child in a way that will help you parent them at every stage of their development. In addition, your child’s behavior may be stirring things up in you (e.g. feelings of rejection, frustration, fear). We may explore how experiences with your own parents might be impacting your emotional responses. Our goal is to create shifts in your internal experience that will change the dynamic with your child.

An example: Parenting Therapy Case Study

This fictionalized case study draws upon my experiences with multiple clients to illustrate how Parenting Therapy might look for you.

“Ella” and “Jeremy” have two children: a eight-year-old daughter and five-year-old son. When they first came to me, Jeremy described his son as “a super smart kid who gets into a lot of mischief.” In the weeks before they came to see me, their son had buried his mother’s cell phone in an outdoor flower box and flooded the family bathroom “to see what would happen.” They had been contacted by his teacher to talk about him disrupting class.

Both parents were very worried by their son’s aggression. “Last night, he kicked a hole in the wall because I told him he couldn’t play with the iPad. This past weekend, he bit his older  sister.”

Jeremy and Ella acknowledged that they had different parenting styles. Jeremy described himself as a “big softie” with his kids. Ella was a strict disciplinarian. They were having lots of clashes not only with their son, but with each other about how to handle his behavior.

My work with Jeremy and Ella started with helping them to set healthy boundaries for their children. We also worked on giving them tools to help their son to manage and process his emotions. Rather than sending their son away to his room for a time out, they began sitting with him and using ways we discussed in session to actively calm and connect with him.

Over time, his meltdowns became less intense and less frequent. He developed better ways to express and manage his feelings.

A big breakthrough came when Jeremy and Ella began to understand each other’s parenting styles and develop a more integrated approach. Jeremy was the youngest of a large family and often left to fend for himself. Ella’s father was retired military who had “anger problems” until he joined AA when Ella was 13.

Together, they came to realize that they both were scared by their son’s meltdowns and reacting in ways they’d learned to survive as kids. Whereas Jeremy had a flight reaction, Ella had a fight reaction. I worked with them to learn how to reflect on and manage their own emotional responses and how to support each other in moments of distress.

Through the process of our parenting therapy, Jeremy and Ella grew closer and the good cop / bad cop dynamic shifted into a more unified approach. As they were better able to understand and manage their son’s behavior, the whole family felt more connected. “We used to gird our loins to take our kids to the park, now we leave home expecting to have a great time together knowing we can manage any situation that may arise.”