More than almost any other job; the job of parenting encompasses a huge array of intense, conflicting and confusing emotions about yourself, as a parent, and about your child. Often, parental guilt or a sense of inadequacy is the glue that holds these feelings together. Parents understand the benefits and rewards of spending ‘quality time’ with their children; but, realistically, the ‘parental-time-pie’ can only be divided in so many pieces. Parents hear: “the relationship is important, you must have regular ‘date nights’ as well as ‘studies show that families who eat dinner together, routinely, and talk about their day, seem to thrive’. However, the constantly changing needs of a family can topple this tidy ‘date and dinner night’ picture. Well-meaning outsiders may tell parents ‘each child needs some individual attention’, calling for more time-management acrobatics and logistical contortions. Further complicating the juggling act, parents hear: ‘a family needs to build routines and rituals and do things together’. Parents ask: “How can this routine togetherness happen when my kids have outside activities and a range of ages, interests and abilities?” ‘You seem so stressed-out, are you taking time for yourself?’ a friend might ask. When the 24-hours are already parceled out, how does this happen?
Parents seek therapy for many different reasons, some of which include: help with understanding their child’s problematic behaviors and how to change their reactive responses to these behaviors; noticing that there is an unexplained change in their child’s behavior; hashing out the differences in parenting styles that are confusing for both parents and child; partner conflict that gets shunted through a child; dealing with a high-needs or special-needs child; sibling rivalry; unresolved issues or trauma from the parent’s family-of-origin; understanding developmental tasks of various ages and stages; lack of parenting support or resources; issues interfacing with schools or other service providers; Adjusting to transitions in the child’s, parent’s or families lives; and understanding their own temperament and the child’s temperament and the subsequent sense of a ‘match’ or ‘mismatch’ in the relationship.
