Helping children with troubled parents: a guidebook

This guidebook is designed to enable practitioners to help children whose emotional wellbeing is being adversely affected by troubled parents.

These are children who live with the burden of having to navigate their parent's troubled emotional states, often leaving them with a mass of painful feelings about a chaotic and disturbing world.

They can feel alarmed by their parent rather than experiencing them as 'home', and a place of safety and solace.

The author explores the fact that when parents are preoccupied with their own troubles, they are often unable to effectively address their child's core relational needs, e.g. soothing, validating, attunement, co-adventure, interactive play.

As a result, children are left self-helping, which all too often means drugs, drink, self-harm, depression, anxiety, eating disorders or problems with anger in the teenage years.