Case Studies in Counselling Parents

When counsellors and other mental health professionals work with parents and/or their children towards the reduction of distress or improvement in behaviour in the children, they encounter a raft of challenges not seen as markedly in other strands of counselling. Many of those challenges are detailed in the companion course to this one: Counselling Parents: The Basics. That course also focuses on the parenting and attachment styles that tend to influence parenting behaviours as an intergenerational phenomenon; it is largely theoretical. This course - a case study one - is offered in order to illustrate how the theories may manifest in the lives of actual clients. Each of two case studies details the story of the case, poses some questions for reflection, and then offers a possible response to each of the questions. The first case study, is about a toddler, Marita, who loses her mother in a horrific bus accident and must move beyond both grief and trauma to re-do the developmental work of attachment formation. The other case study describes the journey of a family toward modified family dynamics which will help 10-year-old Will to eliminate bullying behaviour. Parenting styles come to the fore in this case study as the background context in which the behaviour occurs. Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to: identify trauma and bereavement behaviours which make it challenging for a child to form a new attachment to a primary caregiver; explain the role of primary caregivers in helping a child move through grief and trauma to facilitate attachment formation; list the primary objectives of any treatment plan to assist a child in forming an attachment to a new mother-figure; identify the probable factors in a family dynamic which give rise to bullying behaviour; list the types of therapies that may be effective at reducing or eliminating bullying behaviour; show how a treatment plan focused on the whole family may combine disparate components to effectively combat bullying behaviour.