Parenting difficulties

Parents describe a house where the same forty minutes happen every evening. Homework. Screens. Getting out of the door in the morning. The same argument, the same voices, the same ending, six days a week.

A four-year-old who hits. A seven-year-old who will not go to school, with a stomach ache that is completely real at 7am and gone by ten. Two children who cannot be in one room. A teenager whose door has been shut for four months.

They describe disagreeing with each other. One parent strict, one soft, and each becoming more so because the other is. They describe a grandparent in the same house with a different rule, and the child learning very early which door to knock on. They describe advice from everyone, all of it confident and none of it the same.

And nearly every parent describes two more things. The first is hearing themselves shout and not recognising the voice. The second is guilt — that this is a verdict on them, that other families seem to manage, that asking for help is an admission.

It is worth saying plainly: coming here is not a verdict on you as a parent. Most of the families PHC sees are doing a great deal right and are stuck on one thing that has grown.

Recognising your family in a paragraph on a website is not the same as knowing what is going on. This page describes; it does not assess your child or you, and there is nothing here to score.

You do not need a crisis to come.

What a clinician pays attention to is duration, spread and cost. A pattern that has repeated for months rather than through one hard term. A difficulty that shows up in more than one place — at home and at school, not only with one parent.

If a school has raised something, a clinical view is worth having before the next meeting rather than after it. And if either parent has become frightened of their own temper, that is a reason to come now.

What presents as a behaviour problem quite often turns out to be something else wearing behaviour as a coat — a learning difficulty, a neurodevelopmental profile, or anxiety. That is why assessment comes before advice here.

Only a qualified clinician can tell you what is going on — a website cannot. What a page like this can tell you is that the question is a reasonable one to bring.

PHC is an assessment-first practice. We do not hand out parenting advice before we understand the child it would be applied to.

1. An initial sessionA conversation about what is happening at home: what the pattern is, how long it has run and what has been tried. Parents are frequently seen on their own for this. Nothing is administered before it.
2. Assessment, where the child's own profile is the questionWhere the picture suggests that learning is part of it, the route is a learning and achievement assessment. Where attention, development or social difficulty is the question, it is an ADHD and autism assessment. Both are administered by a qualified clinical psychologist and produce a written report. Where neither is warranted, neither is done — you will not be given tests you do not need.
3. A psychologist matched to what the assessment foundPsychologists at PHC are not assigned on availability. Assignment is based on speciality, the presenting needs, clinical fit and the child's age.
4. The work itselfSome of it is with you: behaviour strategies built around your actual household rather than a generic plan. Some of it may be with the child — for under-sevens through play therapy rather than conversation. Where the difficulty sits between people rather than inside one of them, family psychotherapy treats the family as the unit of work. Sessions are 50 minutes, in clinic at our DHA clinic or in PECHS, or online.

• ADHD
• Learning difficulties
• Family difficulties
• Learning and achievement assessment
• Family therapy