Parenting can be both incredibly fulfilling and a challenging experience. Parents may feel the demands of meeting their children’s needs, supporting their child’s growth, and fostering their child’s emotional wellbeing. They may also feel like the more they give to their child, the less they can have to give to themselves. That’s not to mention the stress of parsing out parenting “advice” from the media, friends, and family. As we wrote about in a previous blog, Benefits of Therapy for Parents, therapy may be helpful for all parents to foster their emotional wellbeing, sharpen their parenting skills, and improve communication with their children and others. Therapy may be particularly helpful for parents facing life transitions or working with challenges in family structures.
4 Types of Parents That Can Benefit From Therapy:
- Counseling for New Parents: Being a new parent can be thrilling, terrifying, and exhausting all at the same time. Therapy can help clients find space to talk about their emotions with a nonjudgmental professional, hear that they’re not alone, learn skills so they can continue to look after themselves while caring for their child, and learn to set boundaries with “well-meaning” friends and family.
- Counseling for Divorced Parents: Therapy can provide space to process the challenges from your marriage and divorce so divorced parents can leave the session and have more space and energy to focus on their life with their child. Therapy can also help build skills in communicating with co parents, step-parents, and other caregivers. Co parent counseling sessions with both co parents present may also build their skills and facilitate decisions in a way so both co parents feel heard.
- Counseling for Step Parents: Step parents may feel simultaneous love and care for their stepchildren and confusion on how to navigate. They may also face some confusing or belittling messages from others about their involvement in their stepchildren’s lives. Therapy may be helpful for step parents to feel validated in their feelings, make space to problem-solve, and gain understanding of their values within their step parenting role.
- Counseling for Single Parents: Being a single parent can be incredibly demanding, and many single parents find themselves feeling lonely and spread thin. Seeing a therapist can be a wonderful step in gaining an hour of your week back to focus on yourself, feel like you have a support person cheering you on, and share about the stress of being a single parent so less stress may be felt at home.
If you are interested in getting support, our therapist’s at Marwil & Associates have years of experience supporting parents in living more fulfilling and authentic lives.
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