Parent Consultation

Working together to support your child.

Having a child, teen, or young adult with emotional challenges can be difficult for most parents. In these instances, many parents will feel uncertain about how to most effectively handle their child’s behavior. Understandably, caregivers will often find themselves experiencing a range of emotions including anxiety, stress, frustration, guilt, and sadness.

While the primary strategy for treating psychological disorders is by directly treating the person who suffers with the disorder, there is strong evidence that suggests working directly with parents of youth or young adults who are suffering with emotional difficulties can make a big difference.  We now know that focusing only on the child who is suffering is often not enough.

Parent consultation is offered to those individuals who have youth or young adult children who are experiencing emotional challenges.  This can be provided to parents with, or without, a child participating in therapy.

Consultations are less often traditional therapy sessions and more a way to help develop and promote effective parenting.  Through discussion, parents work to better understand and to even more skillfully respond to their child’s emotions. This may involve learning specific Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) skills around tolerating distress, mindfulness, emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness, and SPACE Treatment.

Some common goals of parent consultation include figuring out how to help relieve a child’s distress, reinforce new, more effective behaviors and extinguish unhealthy ones, and strengthen the relationship between parents and their child.  In addition, parent consultation can also be helpful in addressing differences in parenting approaches between parents, developing strategies for better academic success, devising methods for managing influences outside of the family, and coming up with ways that adults can better manage their own stressors.