I’ve worked as a psychologist with our team to support children and young people for over 25 years and have over the last decade I’ve seen a significant increase in the number of parents who seek  mental health treatment for their children and young people.  While therapy is not a magic fix, I do believe it can be an important step towards improving young people’s emotional well-being.  

Unfortunately what many parents I’ve talked with do not always realize is that their involvement in their children's therapy may be just as important as the child or young people’s own attendance at therapy sessions…

As a psychologist working with children and young people, I meet *parents* (for brevity I’ll use ‘parents’ throughout this article, but I’m referring of course to all primary caregivers, biological parents or not) every week who are struggling with parenting related negative emotions and experiences such as parental stress, guilt, fatigue, frustration, anxiety and overwhelm. There is also a plethora of academic and research literature documenting the existence of these experiences…

Around 10% to 15% of young people experience difficulties with aggression, impulsivity, following instructions and other challenging or disruptive behaviors – well beyond what the average child or young person of their same age experiences.  What this looks like in their daily life varies considerably from child to child – but usually these kids and teens seem to get frustrated more easily than others, find it really tough to manage this frustration and often yell/scream/throw things.  Some might also have low motivation to follow instructions from adults, and some might consistently act deceitfully or frequently break school and home rules…

Many children and teens with mental, emotional, or social health challenges are engaged in some kind of therapeutic program – this might be a course of one-to-one therapy, a group program, online learning programs, or even self-help books or workbooks.

There are thousands of different therapeutic programs for young people, and these have many varied types of content.  These programs might cover topics such as understanding and managing their body and physiological tension, maintaining and repairing relationships, increasing their positive and confident self-talk, identifying their values and strengths, being compassionate towards themselves, social problem solving and almost countless other ideas…

Children and teens (like adults) often report thoughts and beliefs which they find distressing (for example: “I’m horrible”; “people think I’m boring”; picturing themselves doing badly on a test).

There are different ways parents/caregivers might help their child/teen cope with these.   For example, we might help young people to think about whether their thoughts and feelings are really true – and whether there are alternative thoughts and beliefs which might be more accurate and helpful.

Another way of parents/caregivers helping young people to understand and manage distressing thoughts, images and beliefs is called cognitive defusion and acceptance…