The parenting of adolescents has been the focus of prolific international academic research, but in the UK there has been little attempt to develop clinical services targeted at the parents of teenagers. This article describes setting up a Parent Consultation Service (PCS), provided by child and adolescent psychotherapists, alongside a psychotherapy service for young people. The service is targeted at parents whose adolescents refuse, or fail, to engage in treatment in their own right. The parents of these troubled young people are often left with great anxiety for their children and can be bearing the brunt of their children's emotions and behaviour without any access to sources of help. The PCS utilizes two measures; the Problem Perception Questionnaire and the Stress Index for Parents of Adolescents (SIPA), to provide data about the difficulties experienced by parents and to evaluate the outcome of the service. The results of a statistical analysis of the data show significant changes in parents' perceptions of the problems in their relationship with their adolescent and in the stress levels they experience. A service evaluation survey shows that parents rate all aspects of the service highly. The results are discussed and linked to research on 'authoritative' parenting.
Adolescents in serious emotional difficulty are often unwilling to accept help from formal and statutory services. However, they remain a great worry to their parents, families and society as a whole. In this paper, I present the development of a model where the parents of adolescents are seen without the adolescent being referred. The adolescents themselves are occasionally present to help in the thinking about what they need from their parents and what they find unhelpful. They are not there to be engaged in therapy. Parents are encouraged to restore their authority and develop their role as parents appropriate to the new demands and needs of adolescents, who are held in mind by the therapist and are engaged indirectly through the work with their parents.
Most parenting interventions report high dropout rates for parents who exhibit clinically high levels of stress and/or are parents of adolescents with severe emotional and/or behavioral difficulties. The objective of this preliminary study was to evaluate the feasibility and real-world effectiveness of the Open Door Approach to Parenting Teenagers (APT), a six-session individually delivered face-to-face intervention for typically hard to engage parents of 11 to 21-year-olds. A one-group, pre-post evaluation design was adopted due to the naturalistic clinic-based setting of the study. Participants were 279 parents reporting clinical levels of stress relating to parenting an adolescent. Parents receiving the APT intervention demonstrated lower dropout rates than other parenting programs and reported high scores across several items relating to service satisfaction. The APT intervention was associated with significant reductions in parental stress and improvements in parentadolescent relationships immediately post-intervention. Findings suggest that parents found the APT intervention acceptable and beneficial, and further suggest that the intervention is feasible and effective in retaining hard to engage parents. Moreover, preliminary findings suggest that the APT intervention is a promising intervention that may support parents who fail to engage in group programs. However, further research is required to establish the efficacy of the intervention.
psychodynamic work in the school setting, as it utilises the positive transference to build ego-strength. It offers a valuable experience to many young people in its own right, and provides a possible gateway for them to enter more specialist and intensive psychotherapeutic treatment later on if needed, which takes into account and works through the full force of the negative transference. A clinic-based setting is likely to be more able to withstand the inevitable storms of this crucial, latter aspect of the work. Those interested in thinking further about the issues raised in this commentary might also want to refer to a thought-provoking book edited by Geoffrey Baruch (2001) entitled 'Community-based Psychotherapy with Young People'.
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