Parent Counseling

Parent counseling also takes place once or twice a week and focuses on parenting skills and emotional issues between you and your teenager.  The pleasant office also serves as a sanctuary for parents to comfortably discuss their concerns regarding their teens, themselves and their whole family. Parent counseling can take the place of teen counseling if your teenager refuses to attend counseling sessions. 

Parents are greatly influenced by how they were raised by their parents.  This can mean that the parenting styles are very similar or that they are very different.  Whatever the case may be parents benefit from exploring how they learned their parenting skills and how they are trying to apply these skills in the present. During this process parenting solutions can become self-evident and parenting styles change for the better in a natural way fed by increased awareness and understanding. 

In many cases parents may find themselves unable to parent in a way that makes sense to them or in the way they learned how.  This means that the parent counseling will focus largely on developing new parenting skills that are effective and more adaptive in the here and now.

Patient Confidentiality 

Confidentiality during parenting sessions is very similar to confidentiality during teenager individual counseling.  The only difference being that your teenager has no right to any of the information discussed during the parenting sessions.  What and when to share is completely up to the parents.  However, the same 3 exceptions to confidentiality exist.

1. The therapist considers the parent to be at a high risk for  suicide.  In this case the therapist will break confidentiality and make  sure that the parent receives the help they need to keep them safe.

2. The therapist considers the parent to be at a high risk for  homicide.  In this case, just like in suicide, the therapist will break  confidentiality and take steps to assure the safety of the potential  victim.

3. The parent reports child abuse to the therapist.  The therapist  is a mandated reporter and is thus under a legal obligation to report  child abuse to the child abuse hotline.  If this happens the department  of children and families will send an investigator to the home of the  teenager to investigate the claim.  The therapist has no influence over  the outcome of the investigation.

Consultation

If you have any questions regarding how the parent counseling process works please give Miguel Brown a call at 786-664-7426 or request a consultation by filling in the form to your right. 

All counseling services are offered in English or Spanish.  I offer flexible office hours that include afternoons and evenings. To see commonly treated issues addressed in counseling services please go to the Treatments tab in the yellow navigation bar above.

By Miguel Brown