What's a Parent's Role?

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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 and use coping strategies during these episodes of emotional dysregulation simply does not yield the same results as working with parents on influencing the conditions contributing to the dysregulation.

Further, placing the onus of change on the child creates more pressure and may be an impossible expectation depending on their brain development. Parents taking ownership of altering a child’s conditions paves a much smoother path to positive change.

An unintended consequence of the strides toward destigmatization of neurodivergence and mental health is that we now collectively tend to overinterpret difference as disorder. Is a child who is prone to forgetting their water bottle every day at school naturally scatterbrained, or do they have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)? Is a teen who's upset about a break-up sad or depressed?

The threshold for a mental health diagnosis—meaning an “abnormal” problem—is that the constellation of a child’s symptoms needs to significantly interfere with their daily functioning.

The problem is the subjectivity inherent within the threshold of “significant interference.” Additionally, in our current culture, obsessed with optimization and wellness, there is a trend of viewing normal struggle as pathology. Social media has amplified messaging that we are all problems to be fixed, so when a parent spots a problem, they want to act fast.

“Does My Child Need Therapy?”

Undoubtedly, therapy is essential for a child’s safety and transformative for their well-being in certain instances. A child or teen struggling with serious symptoms such as self-harm, suicidal thoughts, trauma reactions, or severe aggression requires treatment. Adolescents feeling deeply disconnected from their caregivers can also benefit immensely from the support of a trusted therapist. If a teen requests a meeting with a therapist, they should get it.

What's a Parent's Role?

Take our Authoritative Parenting Test

Find a family therapist near me

However, most children and teens fall in the middle of the bell curve of daily functioning. They live in the gray area, leaving parents wondering whether they should be doing more for whatever their child is going through in their current phase.

The other reality that butts up against the “Therapy is good in theory” notion is that therapy depends on engagement. I regularly meet with parents who say, “My child would never go to therapy.” Parent-focused work doesn’t require a child’s buy-in to begin making meaningful changes.

What the Science Says

My clinical experience aligns with what the research shows.

There’s evidence in childhood anxiety research that interventions with parents only significantly improve a child’s symptoms. Although parental anxiety significantly predicts child anxiety, likely due to a combination of genes and environment, my experience backs up that the effectiveness of working with parents extends beyond anxiety.

In fact, parent management training is a top recommendation for childhood ADHD treatment. As a psychologist and parent coach working extensively with ADHD, I have seen the immediate effects of parents shifting how they understand their child’s behavior struggles. When parents modify strategies to uniquely fit their child’s neurobiology, this change has significantly more impact than me being in the therapy room with a child an hour a week for months on end.

Parent Support as an Alternative to Child Therapy

Parents can find books and podcasts covering concerns they may be having about their child. Educating and informing oneself about child development, youth mental health, and science-tested parenting strategies can give parents a framework for better understanding what may be underlying their concerns about their child and how to respond more helpfully.

If this personal research still leaves uncertainty about what to do differently to make a change, and/or a nagging doubt remains that “This doesn’t totally apply to my child,” consider at least one session with a parent coach.

I recommend a parent coach over a therapist because, to provide a therapy service, a therapist needs a diagnosis, and the intervention should target a mental health problem. A coach does not have these limitations and can give guidance from the lens of expertise about child development, family systems, and effective parenting strategies.

Be aware, however, that coaching is not a regulated industry, meaning there is no required education level or certification of skills, nor a licensing board to provide oversight. Because of this lack of regulation, I strongly recommend ensuring a parent coach has professional training and experience in child development and mental health. Licensed mental health professionals are beholden to the requirements of their licensing boards even in their role as coaches. It’s an important safeguard when seeking guidance.

Therapy can be life-saving, essential, and transformative—but it’s not a requirement for healthy development. What most shapes a child through the messy parts of growing up isn’t a professional in an office, but the adults at home with them. No matter how helpful I like to think I’ve been to all the children and teens I’ve spent hours doing therapy with, no professional can replace the power of an attuned, supported parent.

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