When parents make the decision to consult a specialist about their child’s difficulties and symptoms, there has usually been a first disappointment in the expectations they placed in them (what we could not be and that we project in our children). Sometimes parents have enough capacity to bear this first frustration, other times it will be necessary to take into account this wound to their self-esteem, since their collaboration and participation in the treatment will depend on it, an indispensable requirement for the cure of the patient, (Therapeutic alliance of parents, Badoni, 2002).
Many parents feel guilty when some kind of psychological disorder is diagnosed in their children, they think what they have done wrong or they feel bad parents. When this feeling is very strong, it will have repercussions contrary to the cure and may even lead to the interruption of treatment. Parents can easily feel judged by the professional and will therefore tend to avoid any consideration of their participation or responsibility in the child’s difficulties. In the interviews with the parents, this damaged, affected parental identity will be taken into account in order to articulate it in a way that is pertinent to the family dysfunction, seeking the meaning of each parent’s discomfort, favoring the parents’ own understanding of the right level of participation and responsibility in their child’s symptom or discomfort.
Joint work: parents and children
Depending on the age of the child and the type of symptomatology, it will be more necessary to work with the parents, sometimes in joint child/parent sessions, sometimes in individual sessions with the parents to carry out a retrospective investigation of the child’s evolution in depth, to deal with specific aspects of the attachment of one of the parents, etc. Other times the parents’ difficulty consists in the fact that throughout the treatment, the child’s improvement calls into question and exposes the parents’ own deficiencies-conflicts, putting the parental couple, or some of its components, in crisis. Allowing the differentiated and separate evolution of the child will entail an effort to reorganize the family dynamics and treat the dysfunctional aspects that sustained the symptom. Excessive attention to the child’s symptom or discomfort often leads to neglect in the couple’s relationship, with the consequent deterioration of the parental capacities at play, in a feedback spiral.
Parent-child connection
In a way, the maternal function and the paternal function are inaugurated with the desire for the child, whether conscious or not. This desire is part of the personality structure, that is, it connects with the most infantile part of our being. To be a father or a mother will therefore require the connection with the child we were, with our most intimate needs and desires, and the game of identifications with the real child. This will take into consideration the history of the couple, as well as the personal histories of each of the parents, with their myths and beliefs.