Essential Psychoanalytic Foundations of Parent Guidance

Presented by Alex Russell Although it might be debatable, it is certainly not hyperbolic to suggest that the job of parenting has never been harder at any point in human history. The demands now placed on parents in modern Western societies are historically unprecedented, as is the sense of responsibility modern parents feel for both their children’s safety and their success. At the same time, children’s mental health problems have steadily increased, and many of the problems children are presenting with involve their parents in immediate and clinically significant ways – for example, problems such as “school refusal” (where a child refuses to go to school for a prolonged period of time), “screen addiction” in the context of an anxious child, or sleep problems often require intervention at both the child and parent levels. Thus, whether it was something they intended to do, or have received training and supervision in, clinicians treating children are increasingly being called upon to offer parent guidance, and this to an increasingly needy generation of parents. This paper reviews the psychoanalytic foundations of the parent guidance I have found myself offering to my own clients and, over the years, to trainees and supervisees. A theoretical basis to parent guidance is essential in my view, because what parents actually need from clinicians in these cases is a way to understand their child’s problem, including, possibly, their own inadvertent contributions to the problem. And it is from this shared conceptual understanding of the problem that two co-parents can develop their own healthy responses to their child that make sense within the context of their family’s values, culture, etc. The need for a clear theoretical basis in this work seems especially important now as clinical training programs increasingly move away from teaching psychological theory in favour of more evidence-based and solution-focussed approaches. Brief clinical examples are given to present a number of key theoretical concepts in both the content (what to offer) and the process (how to offer it) of parent guidance. A conceptual “roadmap of parenting” is offered as an over arching summary of this essentially psychoanalytic approach to providing parent guidance.