Parent Hope Project

This is a six-session, individualized counseling program for parents who have a child who is struggling with mental health or social/behavioral issues. An introduction session helps you understand the program and helps your counselor appreciate the specifics of your family situation. The program is designed to provide parents with fresh awareness and guiding principles to optimize the way they support their child’s well-being. Parents are supported to manage their feelings and reactions towards their struggling child and to consider their role in encouraging their children’s potential for healthy development.

It aims to:

• Optimize the way you support your child’s wellbeing
• Shift focus to what you can adjust rather than trying to change your child
• Promote more autonomy and responsibility in your child
• Help you get back on track as a loving and firm leader
• Establish a longer-term project of parent leadership. This is not a quick fix, but with changes to old patterns of interaction, the child is helped to improve how they manage their own life challenges.

Key message:

Parents are not to blame for their child’s difficulties – many complex factors contribute to symptom development, including genetics and the broader family and social environment. However, parents can contribute to sustainable improvements in their child’s mental health and wellbeing by adjusting how they interact with their child.

It’s natural to want to fix and change a child who is struggling to manage life. Hence it may be a surprise to hear that this program is designed to focus on the parent rather than change the child. A repeated idea in this program is that when parents shift their energies away from trying to fix or change their child and invest in what is in their control as parents, new hopeful pathways open up. Changing another is outside of anyone’s control. Changing oneself, however, is always achievable. When a parent discovers ways to promote more autonomy and responsibility in their child through changing themselves, they can recover hope and confidence. Even gradual changes can make a huge difference to a child’s path towards adulthood. Moreover, a parent’s changes can have a ripple effect and benefit the whole family.