970x125
When a child is struggling emotionally, parents will do almost anything to help.
They search online late into the night. They sit on waiting lists. They read books and articles. They attend appointments, rearrange work schedules, and worry constantly about whether they are doing enough.
Yet many parents discover something unexpected once treatment begins.
They find themselves on the sidelines.
While professionals focus on assessing, diagnosing, and treating their child, parents are often left with little understanding of how they can contribute to recovery.
This arrangement has become so normal that we rarely question it. Yet it raises an important paradox. Parents are among the most influential people in a child’s life, but they are often positioned as observers rather than active participants in treatment.
In my research exploring parents’ experiences of their adolescent’s mental health treatment, many described feeling excluded from conversations and decisions about their child’s care. One mother recalled:
“The counselor didn’t meet with me. She just went straight into meeting her, which I thought was bizarre because maybe she wanted to talk to me about why I wanted her here.”
This experience reflects more than a communication problem. It points to a deeper issue in how we understand children’s mental health.
In Chapter 4 of The Parenting Paradox, I argue that “the parent-child relationship is pivotal to children’s well-being, so leaving parents on the sidelines doesn’t make sense.” This observation emerged from both my clinical work and research with parents navigating child and adolescent mental health services.
The Powerful Pull of the Sickness Lens
Today’s parents are raising children in an increasingly therapeutic culture. Emotional distress is commonly understood through a sickness lens: Symptoms are identified, diagnoses are considered, and professional interventions are sought.
This may have some benefits. More children receive support, and mental health difficulties are discussed more openly than in previous generations.
But every lens highlights some things while obscuring others.
The sickness lens directs attention toward what is wrong with the child and what treatment might fix it. Parents naturally become increasingly focused on the struggling child, and mental health services often reinforce this focus through assessments, interventions, and outcome measures centred on the child.
The result is that both parents and professionals can become absorbed in the question:
“What is wrong with this child?”
Less attention is given to the relationship system surrounding the child.
When Anxiety Organizes Around a Child
Bowen family systems theory offers a different way of understanding children’s symptoms. Rather than viewing difficulties solely as problems residing within an individual child, Bowen theory looks at how anxiety moves through relationship systems.
In The Parenting Paradox, I describe how parents can become caught in an anxious focus on a struggling child. The more a child’s difficulties become the centre of family attention, the harder it can be to see the broader relationship processes operating around them.
Parents understandably devote increasing amounts of attention, energy, and concern to the struggling child. The child gradually becomes the focal point of family—and increasingly societal—anxiety. As worry intensifies, attention becomes further concentrated on the child, potentially constraining the developmental breathing space needed to build resilience and responsibility.
The issue is not that parents cause symptoms. The issue is that family and societal anxiety can become organized in ways that unintentionally maintain an intense focus on the child while overlooking broader relationship patterns that influence resilience, responsibility, and recovery.
What My Research Revealed About Hope
Parenting Essential Reads
One of the most important findings from my research was not simply that parents felt excluded. It was that parents differed in where they located hope.
Parents who remained passive, expecting experts to fix their child, often experienced reduced hope over time. Their confidence rose and fell according to professional advice, treatment outcomes, and symptom improvement.
In contrast, parents who discovered ways to positively alter their interactions with their child developed a more enduring sense of hope. Rather than waiting for professionals to create change, they began to understand how their own responses influenced the relationship system surrounding their child. They became less reactive, less focused on fixing, and more aware of how anxiety shaped family interactions.
The critical difference was agency. Hope emerged not from certainty or symptom reduction but from parents discovering they could positively influence the relationship system surrounding their child. This became the foundation of what I later described as agency-based hope and explored further in Facilitating Parents’ Agency in Child and Adolescent Mental Health: Helplessness to Hope (Brown, 2023).
Beyond Blame
This family systems perspective can easily be misunderstood as blaming parents. It does the opposite. Blame searches for causes. Systems thinking examines patterns. The important question is not:
“Which parent caused this?”
It is:
“How is anxiety operating in this family, and what adjustments from a parent create more space for everyone to function better?”
This shift moves parents away from guilt and toward thoughtful observation of their own participation in relationship patterns. Instead of trying harder to fix a child, parents can learn to notice when anxiety is driving over-focus, over-protection, or over-responsibility.
A Different Question
The dominant question in children’s mental health is often:
“What’s wrong with this child?”
A family systems perspective invites a different question:
“What is happening in the relationship system surrounding this child?”
That shift moves parents from the sidelines back into the picture—not as causes of problems, but as important participants in recovery.
In The Parenting Paradox, I suggest that one of the greatest shortcomings of current approaches is that they often place the burden of change on the child while overlooking the relationship system surrounding them.
My research similarly suggests that one of the most overlooked resources in children’s mental health is helping parents understand their own influence within family relationship patterns and supporting them to act with greater calm, clarity, and confidence.
This insight became the foundation of the Parent Hope Project framework and manual. Rather than teaching parents how to better manage or fix a child, the framework helps parents recognize when anxiety is pulling them into over-monitoring, over-protection, and over-responsibility. Drawing on Bowen’s concept of differentiation, parents learn to strengthen their own functioning, clarify what is and isn’t within their control, and take thoughtful action without becoming driven by worry about their child.
The aim is to help parents recover their parenting leadership while creating conditions that support a child’s growing resilience and responsibility.
As I write in The Parenting Paradox, parents need “compassion and respect, not blame or criticism.” When parents understand their influence within the relationship system surrounding their child, they move from helplessness toward agency-based hope—hope grounded not in fixing a child but in strengthening their capacity to change their part and experience the difference they can make in their child’s recovery.
