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Parents may be over-relying on therapy when many child struggles are developmentally normal.

Parent-focused interventions can reduce child symptoms even without the child in therapy.

The line between normal struggle and disorder is blurrier in today’s mental health culture.

In today's world of media attention around the youth mental health crisis and cultural destigmatization of mental health struggles, it’s understandable that parents seek professional intervention when they have concerns about their children. After 20 years of doing therapy directly with children and teens, however, I have concluded that parents are overreliant on therapy as a solution that may not be solving as much as they hope. Instead, the spark of change is more likely to come from the parents than from a therapist.

I’m not blaming parents as the reason for their children’s struggles, but there’s an opportunity to pull a more powerful lever of change than individual therapy. Parents can meaningfully help their struggling children by doing their own work. Each time I leave a session with parents in my role as parent coach, I marvel at how much more effective this appears to be than the hundreds (thousands?) of hours I’ve spent in therapy with children and teens.

For example, I spend weeks teaching a child coping strategies for strong emotions, but their brains often aren’t developed enough to remember and apply these strategies in the midst of a meltdown. When I work with parents, we discuss patterns of triggers for meltdowns, how to get ahead of potential meltdowns with prevention strategies, and how to respond during a meltdown so as not to exacerbate the child’s emotional dysregulation.

Relying on a young child to learn........

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