Why Parent Coaching? Your Guide to Working with a Parent Coach at Child and Teen Solutions.

NOTE: We use the term “parent” to represent any adult who is in a caregiving role to a child or teen. 

Parents of struggling youngsters may think:

“My kid needs someone to talk to someone outside of our family.”

“My child needs anger management tools.”

“My teen needs to build self-esteem.”

These statements are hard to argue with! There are situations where a child or teen can benefit immensely from having a therapist to help build coping strategies, explore emotions, work through trauma, and to feel validated and affirmed. And yet, parent-based work for child- or teen-based problems can often be more impactful than individual therapy with a young person.

Why is this the case?

Virtually all evidence-based interventions for child and teen mental health problems are parent-based.

Our society somehow has us believing that struggling kids need to be in therapy. There is little evidence to support that enrolling children with a therapist will improve adjustment in the absence of work with the parents. Decades of research in child development and intervention have described programs that have been shown to help childrens’ mental health. There are many child-based interventions, but almost all of them involve key parent components that are skills-based. For some treatment protocols, “dismantling” studies have shown that positive treatment effects are due to the parent, not child, component of the intervention.  Interventions that are at least partially, if not fully, parent-based have been shown to help with child or teen anxiety, OCD, emotion dysregulation, defiance, depression, bedtime problems, mealtime struggles, autism, and ADHD. 

Parents influence their child’s mental health.

In September 2024, The Surgeon General issued an advisory on parents’ mental health. The advisory details the many stressors that are impacting parents and the importance of supporting parent mental health. Research has shown time and again that improving a parent’s mental health can improve a child’s mental health, even without involving the child. It makes sense. If we as parents can be less stressed, have our adult needs met, and be better regulated, we can be more responsive to our kids’ needs and they will be more likely to thrive. 

Many kids are not developmentally ready to make productive use of therapy.

Most treatments for children that target coping skill development involve talking and required understanding of relatively high level concepts. Even when we adapt our approach to be developmentally appropriate, many kids still struggle to make use of the skills that we might teach. Elementary school and even middle school brains have not yet developed  the kind of abstract thinking that is required to learn the skills. This can often be even more the case for neurodivergent kids, who might be more concrete in their thinking and struggle with insight. Some young people may not have the motivation to engage productively in therapy. Of course they want to feel better, but they might not see themselves as having the kind of agency needed to develop and apply new skills. For youngsters with disruptive or dysregulated behavior, they might experience being brought to a therapist as punishing and shaming. 

Young people who struggle with self-regulation and other challenges need their parents to have highly specialized skills in helping to manage these issues.

Generic parenting advice is insufficient for families who have a child who is neurodivergent (e.g., autism, ADHD, learning disabilities) or experiencing significant challenges with anxiety, mood, or emotion-regulation. Problems can be expressed as trouble managing emotions, daily routines, school, or social interactions. Parents of children with these types of issues need to develop tools, protocols, and road maps for how to prevent and de-escalate emotional outbursts, as well as ways to support their child’s developing independence at home and in the world.  

Self-regulation develops in the context of a secure and well regulated parent-child relationship.

From infancy, self-regulation develops in the context of attachment relationships. Kids don’t learn how to self-regulate from being told how to self-calm as much as through attuned relationships with their caregivers. Does this mean that if your child struggles with self-regulation that you’ve failed them in some way? Absolutely not. Self-regulation challenges can be rooted in neurodevelopmental disorders such as communication delays, autism, and ADHD. They can also reflect environmental adverse events or trauma. Still, parents are in the best position to support self-regulation in their children through sensitive and responsive parenting, combined with limit setting strategies. Limit setting is important because it’s part of how children develop the internal controls needed to function productively at home and school. 

What does parent coaching look like?

Parenting appointments are typically conducted over video (telehealth). Parent coaching always starts with an intake appointment with one of our licensed providers. As we hear your story about your child, we will assess what to target in treatment. The targets will involve areas where you would like to see improvement in your child’s behavior. We will let you know where we think change is possible versus where your child may benefit from an adjustment in parent expectations. Adjustment of parent expectations can come into play if your child has neurodevelopmental differences, but also for “neurotypical” children who may benefit from modifications around daily expectations because of where the child is developmentally. For some children, there may be a benefit to us seeing your child in-person for a neurodevelopmental evaluation. The neurodevelopmental evaluation usually leads us to a deeper understanding of your child’s specific developmental profile and needs.   

How is parent coaching different from working with a therapist who sees adults? 

When an adult seeks therapy from a provider who specializes in adults, the focus is on treating that adult’s symptoms, not the child’s symptoms. Providers who specialize in adult therapy may not have expertise about child development and treatment. Treatment success may be determined by alleviation of the adult’s symptoms or improvement in functioning. 

When an adult seeks parenting coaching, the treatment targets the child’s or teen’s struggles, not the parents’ symptoms. Treatment success is typically defined as improvement in the child’s symptoms and functioning.  Parents, of course, often feel better when their child is doing better. 

Even though parent coaching sessions are focused on the child, there is often an emphasis on supporting parents to develop better emotion regulation during interactions with their child or teen. It’s not at all uncommon for parents to unravel emotionally in response to feeling frustrated, helpless, and despondent about the challenges they are having with their child. Parents may find themselves raising their voices, yelling, and making threats when they feel they can’t get through to their child. This is understandable. We can help parents to learn to better modulate their reactions, which often in turn leads to less escalation by the child or teen. 

How is parent coaching different from family therapy?

In family therapy, two or more family members are present in the sessions with the person who is the “identified patient.” Even though the identified patient may have obvious symptoms, the family unit is seen as the focus in treatment, not any one individual. Family therapy may emphasize communication skills to build more positive interactions. Family therapy may draw in extended family as a way to support the household as a whole and promote family growth. 

The role of parent coaching in supporting overall family well-being

Being a parent is vulnerable. There are few things harder than seeing your child or teen in distress. It’s incredibly stressful to feel like you are walking on eggshells. Some families may feel “hostage” by their child or teen’s difficult behavior. Siblings are also impacted. Families might restrict family outings or vacations, and there can be a sense of perpetual tension at home. These cascading negative effects can permeate family life. Through parent coaching, the aim is for parents to feel more confident and clear on how to respond to challenging behaviors and better support their child or teen’s mental health. Families may enjoy greater freedom of movement in their day to day lives and improved household peace. 

When might it help to have my child or teen work with a therapist for themself?

Children with anxiety or OCD who are insightful and have at least some interest in learning new strategies can be great candidates for therapy, whereas children who are struggling with emotion dysregulation or definace may find less benefit. Some children enjoy building their language about emotions and therapeutic narratives about their experiences. Children who need help working through trauma may benefit from therapy. Parent involvement is still key.

Teens may enjoy having a therapy space where they can explore themes related to social and romantic relationships, issues around identity, and family issues. Highly motivated older teens may be able to work productively on building emotion regulation skills. The older the teen, the less parent involvement there may be, but we still find that it can be important to keep parents in the loop about how treatment is going and ways that parents can support therapy goals. 

Common Objections

But this isn’t our fault!  Our other kids are fine, so why do we need parenting work?

Parents of kids or teens with mental health problems need to develop specialized skills for handling emotional dysregulation, anxiety, and defiance —just to name af few of the more common issues. These problems take a toll on the family and tend to negatively impact the quality of the parent-child relationship. It’s worth repeating that the evidence-based interventions for child-based problems are either fully parent-based or have parent-based components that are integral to treatment success.  

What about if we’re going through a divorce? Shouldn’t my kids have someone to talk to?

The number one way to buffer your child from the potentially negative impact of divorce is for the ex-spouses to minimize conflict, co-parent collaboratively, and prioritize calm and stability. If you can achieve these goals, you will be protecting your children in a way that far exceeds the impact of any therapist working individually with your child. That’s not to say that there isn’t a potential benefit to child therapy, but rather that this approach will have little impact if parents persist in conflict during and post-divorce. 

We’re too exhausted and can’t see adding anything more to our plate.

We completely understand!  Consider that you are probably already spending countless hours trying to manage your child’s challenges. Talking with a parent coach and learning new strategies does take time, but the hope is that you will earn back time by reducing the hours you spend in drawn out struggles with your child or teen. Also, your parent coach can customize new tools for you so that you can apply them in manageable small steps. 

We’ve already tried everything!

We hear this a lot. Most of the time, this means that parents have applied ideas that they’ve learned on social media or read in trendy books. Some of the advice out there is misguided and goes against well-established evidence-based practices that can help. Child and teen mental health issues are complicated. Effective treatment requires a great deal of creativity,  nuance, and customization. These are treatment elements that cannot be learned through social media or reading. 

Begin Parent Coaching in Seattle, Washington (or from anywhere in Washington!)

If you are ready to start working with a parent coach at CATS, here are the steps to take:

1. Send us a message or schedule a free phone inquiry with our Client Care Coordinator so that you can get your questions answered and we can gather information from you. 

2. Review our Billing FAQ page.

3. Our Client Care Coordinator will walk you through the steps for scheduling and preparing for your first appointment with a CATS therapist. 

Other Mental Health Services Provided by Child and Teen Solutions

Parent coaching is a great first step when seeking help for a young person struggling with issues such as self-regulation, ADHD, autism/ PDA, emotion regulation, defiance, or anxiety. We also offer Theraplay to families of young children who are looking to have sessions together with their child. For youngsters who are interested in working directly with a therapist, we encourage you to read our child and teen service pages. In some cases, the therapist who is working with you in parent coaching can eventually shift to focusing on work with your child. Alternatively, it can sometimes be best to assign a separate CATS provider to the child or teen who is seeking their own therapist. We also offer neurodevelopmental evaluations when more information about a child’s or teen’s developmental and learning profile would be helpful. We work with a wide range of family constellations and identities, and all of our services are LGBTQ+ Affirming.