When your child is struggling, you struggle too.
FOR PARENTS AND FAMILIES
Watching someone you love change in ways that worry you can be frightening. Your child may be anxious, angry, withdrawn, disengaged, depressed, struggling with their self-worth, using coping strategies that scare you, or making choices that seem completely at odds with the life they say they want.
You can see their pain. You can sometimes see where things might be heading. And you desperately want to make it better.
Of course you do. You love them.
I call this the curse of the loving parent.
Love, experience, and fear can make us see an entire trajectory in a single moment. You find your child on their phone instead of studying and suddenly you aren't responding to the phone—you are responding to everything you fear that moment might mean for their future.
When we're frightened, we can become urgent. We push. Control. Lecture. Fix. Ask too many questions. They feel attacked and defend themselves, withdraw, or stop telling us things. And suddenly the very love driving us towards our child can make it harder to reach them.
It makes sense.
But there is something here for us to understand.
One of the shifts I often help families make is from
“They should be able to do this”
to:
“They don't have this skill yet.”
A young person may know what they need to do without yet having the emotional, behavioural, or executive skills to consistently do it. And when young people are unhappy, they will often try to solve that unhappiness with whatever coping strategies they currently have—even when those strategies create new problems.
We can build different skills.
But nobody learns particularly well while feeling attacked, ashamed, or defensive. So we work on creating enough calm and connection for everyone to listen, understand, and begin doing something differently.
I don't come into a family looking for who is to blame.
I help us understand what is happening—to your child, to you, and between you. We find a shared understanding of the problem, identify what each person needs, and agree what you are trying to move towards together.
Sometimes your child needs support to heal and develop different ways of coping.
Sometimes you need help knowing when to step in, when to step back, what to take seriously, what not to panic about, and how to stay connected when you are scared.
Often, the whole family needs somewhere to exhale, regroup, and find one another again.
I will hold that process without shame and without losing sight of where we are trying to go.
Because underneath the fear, frustration, conflict, and behaviours that brought you here, there is often an extraordinary amount of love.