When Your Child Is Struggling, Who Is Supporting the Parent?

There is often an enormous amount of attention on the child and rightly so. But somewhere in the middle of appointments, school meetings, assessments and advice, the parent can become almost invisible.

I was recently speaking with a parent whose child has ADHD and has been unable to participate in the ‘normal’ day-to-day activities of life and what unfolded was the number of professionals who had already become involved in this young child’s life.

Their child had seen perhaps seven or eight different specialists.

I asked him a simple question:

If you were ill and were being seen to by seven or eight different professionals, how would you feel?

“Angry and exhausted.” was part of his answer.

And he is an adult.

For a child who may already be struggling with change, trust, emotional regulation or feeling misunderstood, repeated introductions to new adults can become another thing to manage. Another relationship to negotiate. Another explanation to give. Another uncertainty about whether this person will stay.

That does not mean professional support is wrong. Far from it. Children with ADHD and related difficulties may need specialist assessment and appropriately qualified help.

But the parent may need something different.

The parent is living it too

When a child stops participating in everyday life, becomes distressed or struggles to function in ways that other children seem to manage, family life can gradually begin to revolve around the problem.

Parents can find themselves constantly asking:

Am I pushing too hard? Am I not pushing enough? Should I insist? Should I back off? Is this anxiety? ADHD? Something else? Am I making it worse?

There may also be meetings, phone calls, conflicting advice and the fear of making the wrong decision.

And beneath all of that can sit something much more personal:

What if I can’t help my own child?

That is a painful place for any parent to be.

Coaching is not treatment

Coaching a parent in this situation is not about diagnosing the child or offering clinical advice.

It is not about telling a parent what their child needs.

That belongs with appropriately qualified specialists.

The coaching space can instead focus on the parent themselves.

What are they feeling?

What are they carrying?

Where are they becoming reactive rather than responsive?

What can they influence and what is outside their control?

What assumptions are they making about their child’s behaviour?

What happens to the relationship when every interaction becomes about school, behaviour or the next appointment?

Sometimes a parent needs somewhere that they do not have to be the strong one.

Seeing the situation through the child’s eyes

One useful shift can be moving temporarily away from:

“How do I get my child to do this?”

and towards:

“What might this situation feel like from my child’s perspective?”

That does not mean removing boundaries or avoiding difficult decisions.

It means becoming curious before becoming corrective.

For a child who is already overwhelmed, what appears to an adult as refusal, defiance or avoidance may be communicating something very different.

And when parents are frightened, exhausted or under pressure themselves, curiosity can be difficult to access.

That is where having a thinking space can help.

Supporting the system, not just the symptom

A struggling child does not exist in isolation. There is a family around them.

When one person in that system is under enormous pressure, everybody adjusts.

Parents may disagree about what to do. Siblings can feel overlooked. Relationships become strained. Ordinary family life can begin to shrink around the issue.

Helping a parent think more clearly, understand their own reactions and decide how they want to show up may not remove the child’s difficulties.

But it can change something important:

the emotional environment in which the whole family is living.

And sometimes that is a meaningful place to begin.