Acknowledging that your young child needs therapy is a special kind of heartache. This heartache is often accompanied by feelings of inadequacy, self-blame, blaming others, rage, and helplessness.
The courage it takes for a parent to reach out to a professional whom they have never met and say, “I’m having a hard time with my child and I need help” is the culmination of many months—and oftentimes years—of trying to help their child while feeling helpless, hopeless, and enraged.
The parent who does seek out help, instead of hiding, minimizing, or denying the various emotional and behavioral struggles they and their child are experiencing, is the parent who deserves the utmost respect, recognition, and reward.
So why do parents oftentimes feel so bad after their first session with their child’s therapist?
Many parents enter the first session with their child’s therapist assuming that they will be a passive participant in the session with their child, or that they will be able to leave their child in the consultation room to be helped or,l fixed.
Parents realize very quickly that this is not how child therapy works with many therapists. These therapists may reveal that they are far more interested in the parents’ emotional struggles than their child’s.
“My kid needs help, so why am I being interrogated about my money childhood?”
Because, the relationship between the parent and child isn’t working.
Young children are not able to process their feelings on their own. Until they are able to understand, make sense of, and put their big feelings into words, they need help from a parent or caregiver to hold, share, and make sense of their feelings for them, and with them.
This is called co-regulation which, when repeated over the course of a young child’s life, leads to self regulation in adulthood. It is also another way of describing the process of feeling comforted, listened to, and understood.
This process can be undermined when a parent sees their child at a certain age struggling with a certain issue. It can awaken in the parent a memory of being the same age as their child, struggling with similar issues. How those issues were handled by the parent’s parents can lead to all sorts of conflicts for the parent when they try to help their child through those similar emotional challenges.
This may result in a parent unable to help their child co-regulate.
It is likely they weren’t comforted, listened to, and understood while having the very same feelings their child is struggling with. Instead, the parent—as a child—was perhaps ignored, yelled at, met with shock, punished, or not taken seriously, having those feelings denied. This can become confusing to parents when their child is exhibiting behaviors in response to those very same feelings that are unfamiliar to them.
When parents have the courage to understand their own histories, their relationship with their child and their child’s behavior improves significantly.
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