Therapeutic Parenting Support offers nurturing, trauma and attachment informed strategies to help parents and caregivers support their children. This approach supports caregivers with children who are struggling with big feelings and worries as well as those with attachment difficulties or developmental trauma, focusing on safety, connection, and understanding behaviour as communication.
The therapist provides space for parents and carers to express and explore difficult thoughts and emotions safely, to understand other’s experiences and views, appreciate other’s needs, build on strengths and make useful changes in the way they parent their children. Both individuals and couples can find Therapeutic Parenting Support helpful, as an opportunity to reflect on important relationships and find ways forward.
Therapeutic Parenting Support provides tools to manage stress, enhance emotional regulation, and maintain consistent, firm boundaries as well as offering techniques and resources.
Research shows Therapeutic Parenting Support is useful for families experiencing a very wide range of difficulties and experiences:
- Attachment Issues: Difficulties forming secure bonds, which may manifest as being either overly clingy or completely withdrawn/rejecting of affection.
- Survival Behaviours: Actions rooted in past neglect and trauma, such as hoarding food, stealing money, or persistent lying.
- Emotional Dysregulation: Intense, overhwelming emotional outbursts, sudden rages, or an inability to self-soothe when stressed.
- Aggression & Defiance: Violent behaviour towards others, destruction of property, and extreme resistance to authority or household rules.
- Hypervigilance & Anxiety: Being constantly “on edge,” easily startled, or struggling with even minor changes in routine.
- Developmental Gaps: Children functioning at a much younger emotional level than their actual age, often struggling with social skills, cause-and-effect thinking, and impulse control.
- Inappropriate Social Boundaries: “Indiscriminate friendliness,” where a child may seek excessive affection from strangers while remaining distant from their primary caregivers.
- Child and adolescent mental health issues including anxiety, depression, self harm, low self esteem, disordered eating, anger related difficulties and school related issues
- Neurodiversity and communication difficulties
- Adult mental health issues and the impact this has on parenting
- Separation, divorce and step-family life
- Fostering, adoption, kinship care and the needs of ‘looked after’ children
- The impact of domestic violence and abuse
- Drug and alcohol misuse
This Therapy aims to:
- Be inclusive and considerate of the needs of each member of the family and/or other key relationships (systems) in people’s lives
- Recognise and build on peoples’ strengths and relational resources
- Work in partnership with families and others, rather than imposing ideas or techniques on them
- Be sensitive to diverse family forms and relationships, beliefs and cultures
- Enable people to talk, together or individually, often about difficult or distressing issues, in ways that respect their experiences, invite engagement and support recovery.
Read more about our Family Therapist, Suzanne Davis