Parents & Carers

Working therapeutically with those that care for children.

I believe helping to strengthen the parent child relationship is one of the most important investments you can make in your family’s life. 

While children are still in your care, you as their primary carers can administer through your relationship: more self confidence, repair hurts, offer love and connection, all of which help strengthen your child’s mental health. By shining a compassionate light on how you relate to your children I can teach you therapy skills and up to date neuroscience and ways of relating to support your child’s brain growth into a healthier more integrated piece of kit that they can take into the rest of their lives. 

Help for parents and carers

Ever heard that one about how we need to pass a driving test to learn how to drive a car and yet we don’t have much teaching on how to be a parent? I can teach therapy skills to parents and up to date theories of mind to help them address parenting struggles particular to their unique family. I work towards the goal of helping adults facilitate a warm, safe connection with their child.

I listen to the particular issues in the home, I offer practical tools and theories to address and understand certain behaviours and I offer help to heal parental inner child pain to guide parents or carers to be more present in their parenting. I am passionate about teaching tools and healing trauma so that parents can reclaim that golden thread of relationship between them and their children, in order that everyone in the family can feel less anxious and more confident and secure in themselves.

Parent (or carer) and child work

In parent and child work I meet with you, the parent or carer, and usually take up to four sessions to assess the presenting issues and teach you some basic therapy skills and tools and strategies relevant to your unique situation.   I then welcome you and your child together and we run six-six-eight child-led play based therapy sessions where I gradually sit back and let you facilitate practicing the skills you learnt with me,  providing you with phone support afterwards.  We then transition this process into your home where I help you set up half an hour weekly play sessions to continue this input (with phone supervision if needed).

The aim of this is to use the most valuable relationship your child has for healing - that is his/her relationship with you.  Once a relationship between parent and child has been given more attention, often the child's difficult behaviours melt away as the child's basic need to feel connected to caregiver is met and they feel better about themselves, more confident, more at ease and joyful.  Once a relationship is strengthened between parent and child, the child is more resilient when life gets tricky, which can be the nature of life at times!