Consultations for Parents

What are Parents Consultations?

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Parents consultations can be offered during therapy or for initial assessments. Parents with children that experience emotional and/or behavioural difficulties or children that don’t feel comfortable attending sessions, can benefit from a space to explore freely their feelings and worries to better understand their children’s needs. 

 

The sessions  are informed by the Systemic and Attachment models and are aimed at creating a space for parents to explore the nature and context of difficulties they face, identify helpful and constraining dynamics to mobilise preferred ways of working together as a team through attuning to their children’s emotions and needs, within the family dynamics and the wider context. 

 

During the first consultation a general assessment of the child’s developmental history and current strengths and needs of the child and the family are completed, to guide the best plan of support. 

 

As part of the initial sessions, we co-create a map with parents on how to attune to their children’s emotions through secure emotional regulation strategies in the communication and expression of needs that fit to each unique family composition, amongst every day challenges, medical needs, painful events such as losses and illnesses, past and current generational family patterns that may not fit with current beliefs and cultural contexts of how to fulfil these roles.

 

This approach includes enhancing resilience and self-esteem in children while they explore and better understand their needs; grow confident in communicating their emotions and practice problem-solving skills in the challenges they face. 

 

An important process of making sense of difficult behaviours and emotions, is understanding the impact of the meaning the child and adults around him/her attributes to those behaviours and emotions, and how it affects the child’s idea of self. The way children are attended to and the responses they receive about their behaviours, build on the internal models of what they believe about themselves and others, how to read others behaviours and how to make sense of the world. 

 

Parents are offered a space to explore their own ways of attuning with their children's emotions towards feeling equipped to guide their children confidently and warmly in everyday activities and challenging times so that children feel safe and loved while experiencing difficult emotions and behaviours and can increasingly feel more in charge and confident in knowing what they need and how to communicate it. 

 

At times a more specialised assessment is recommended, such as a sensory and/or neurodevelopmental assessment, and school and GP consultations are valued components of the process when relevant.