Supporting parents/caregivers in distress
Parents/caregivers with children/teens with emotional problems or life challenges experience a higher level of distress and stress than parents with children/teens without these challenges. Common experiences for these parents/caregivers include:
Worry and anxiety about their children/teen’s well-being, safety, health, friendships, relationships, school performance, behaviour, and life choices, financial demands of parenting, their past parenting behaviours, and upcoming parenting decisions.
Guilt, self-blame, or self-criticism about parent behaviours such as getting angry, management of their children/young people’s routines (e.g. time on technology is a common source of guilt), how much time they spend with their child and more intensely - about how their parenting might have contributed to children/young people’s health, life, or psychological challenges.
High levels of mental/physical exhaustion and fatigue about a sense there is more to do each day than they can manage and that they have no energy or resources to do the work of parenting.
High levels of parental irritability, anger, and frustration - and the aversive nature of feeling chronically irritated and angry for parents themselves.
Parent chronic sorrow or grief – especially for parents with children with disabilities, disorders, serious mental health conditions or significant life challenges (e.g. drug and alcohol use) - or that which occurs when children leave home (or when there are long term ruptures in relationships).
Low parenting self-esteem, when parents believe they simply do not have the skills, abilities, or knowledge to effectively parent, influence their child, or manage tasks related to parenting.
High parental loneliness or sense of isolation, whereby parents report being cut off from social supports, due to lack of time, resources, or energy.
How can we help?
A small team of our experienced child and adolescent psychologists (who have worked with children/teens with difficulties alongside parents/caregivers for many years) offer a 6 session intervention where we support parents to feel calmer about their parenting journey, cope with the stressors, frustrations, fears and fatigue which comes with having children and young people who are having tough times.
For these sessions (unlike our work with children/adolescents) - the parent/caregiver themselves is the client (meaning that the file and invoices are in their name).
We use a combination of evidence based approaches for parenting distress (including CBT, attachment orientated work, self compassion therapy and mindfulness based approaches). Although practical parenting support may be part of the intervention we use to reduce parenting distress, we will not spending a great deal of time only on these specific strategies (keeping in mind that we will not have done a full assessment of your child) but instead want to focus on how we support you to manage your own concerns, and help you feel able the type of parenting and support of your child that you think they need.
Please note, that our focus during these sessions is parenting distress specifically and if we (and the parent) decide that other, broader mental health issues are more significantly contributing to their distress - we will refer them on to psychologists who work with adult mental health issues more generally.
Parents/caregivers who are experiencing high level distress which impairs their daily functioning may be able to get a referral from their GP to access rebates under the Medicare Better Access program (if this is used, we need the referral to state that the difficulties are related primarily to parent distress or “adjustment disorder related to parenting stress” - so that it is clear that this is the work we are doing, and not mental health issues more generally).
To contact us to make an appointment, call us on 8357 1711, or email us at admin@developingminds.net.au
