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Parents are often sidelined in treatment despite their influence on a child's well-being.

A sickness lens can reinforce anxious focus on struggling children for both parents and professionals.

Strengthening parent agency supports children's resilience and recovery.

When a child is struggling emotionally, parents will do almost anything to help.

They search online late into the night. They sit on waiting lists. They read books and articles. They attend appointments, rearrange work schedules, and worry constantly about whether they are doing enough.

Yet many parents discover something unexpected once treatment begins.

They find themselves on the sidelines.

While professionals focus on assessing, diagnosing, and treating their child, parents are often left with little understanding of how they can contribute to recovery.

This arrangement has become so normal that we rarely question it. Yet it raises an important paradox. Parents are among the most influential people in a child's life, but they are often positioned as observers rather than active participants in treatment.

In my research exploring parents' experiences of their adolescent's mental health treatment, many described feeling excluded from conversations and decisions about their child's care. One mother recalled:

"The counselor didn't meet with me. She just went straight into meeting her, which I thought was bizarre because maybe she wanted to talk to me about why I wanted her here."

"The counselor didn't meet with me. She just went straight into meeting her, which I thought was bizarre because maybe she wanted to talk to me about why I wanted her here."

This experience reflects more than a communication problem. It points to a deeper issue in how we understand children's mental health.

In Chapter 4 of The Parenting Paradox, I argue that "the parent-child relationship is pivotal to children's well-being, so leaving parents on the sidelines doesn't make sense." This observation emerged from both my clinical work and research with parents navigating child and adolescent mental health services.

The Powerful Pull of the Sickness Lens

Today's parents are raising........

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