Parenting young adults has never been easy. If you’re a parent of kids over 18, you probably understand how tough it is to understand when is the right time to communicate with them, how to help them deal with their problems, or whether or not to get involved in their private lives.
Young adultery is an age when your children are somewhat less dependent on you than before. You no longer need to teach them basic life skills, follow them everywhere they go, and control them to make sure they’re safe, but still, it doesn’t mean that once your kid reaches 18, parenting them gets easier.
In fact, you might notice that being a parent of a young adult gets harder and harder, and you can no longer handle the stress alone. However, since living in a happy and healthy environment is vital for everyone’s mental health and well-being, you might need to think about receiving family counseling to get help.
Let’s review the importance of family counseling with parents and young adults, discuss its benefits, and find out why and how it’s done.
What is Family Counseling?
Family counseling is one of the most common and effective types of psychotherapy nowadays. The counseling is oriented towards the relationship between family members and aims to help them resolve conflicts and maintain healthy relationships. The main purpose of family counseling is to determine all kinds of problems that family members are concerned about and work on these problems together with each family member.
Generally, family therapy is a short-term therapy that continues for approximately 12 sessions. Each session usually takes about 50-60 minutes. The key of family therapy is that during sessions, all the family members are present (or sometimes only those members that are willing to participate). They speak to each other and discuss their problems with counseling in order to achieve a satisfying solution.
As a result of family therapy, the emotional connection between family members deepens and they gain adaptive coping mechanisms to become resilient and deal with their problems in the future too.
A family therapy counselor is a mental health professional that usually has a valid license provided by the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT). As studies show, using family therapy as a treatment is effective for dealing with various types of problems between family members (Crane & Morgan, 2007).
Counseling with Parents & Young Adults – Why it’s done
The basic purpose of counseling with parents and young adults is to identify the problems in their relationships, resolve existing conflicts, and avoid future difficulties. One of the most common reasons why parents and young adults’ counseling is done is communication troubles between them.
Moreover, parents often reach out to family counselors in order to overcome stages of change in their and their kids’ lives and set up realistic boundaries. In fact, sometimes parents feel confused about setting up boundaries for their children, can’t understand their needs, and feel that they are bad parents as a result.
Counseling with parents and young adults helps both parents and children to develop clearer patterns of communication and consider one another’s needs and requirements. It’s important to note that sometimes family therapy is an additional treatment that is done alongside other therapies such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, psychotherapy, EMDR therapy, or other types of mental health treatment. Also, family therapy is often used when one of the family members has some mental health disorder and receives other treatment too.
Addiction is the most common example in this case. In fact, addiction treatments in young adults or parents often include family therapy because substance use disorders have a significant impact on families (Lander et al., 2013). As a result, family plays an important role in addiction recovery.
What are the Benefits of Counseling with Parents and Young Adults?
Recent studies prove that counseling with parents and young adults is accompanied by various mental health benefits. Even though each family has different problems and, as a result, their outcomes always differ from each other, some of the most frequent benefits of family counseling are the following:
- Improved skills in problem-solving
- Healthier stress-coping strategies
- The improved emotional connection between family members
- Clearer communication patterns
- Setting healthy boundaries
- Identifying dysfunctional interactions
- Developing healthy family dynamics
Furthermore, based on the 2020 study, family interventions are useful for dealing with various types of mental health disorders such as depression, substance use disorders, anxiety disorders, conduct disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, etc.
Therefore, if a young adult in your family has emotional difficulties, behavioral problems or trouble communicating with you or other people, receiving family treatment that’s focused on parents and young adult relationships could be an optimal idea.
An Informational Course – For Parents Of Young Adults
Most parents in modern life are struggling to take care of their young adult children. However, the problems vary. If you’re desperate to find answers about communicating with your adult child or considering receiving family therapy, we recommend an informational course Parents of Young Adults: What do we do now? presented by a licensed professional counselor, Paul Krauss, MA.
The informational course is designed for parents of young adults who experience different problems regarding their kids. The course includes six specific modules, and during this module, you’ll be able to listen to 3-hour instruction about practical solutions to deal with your problems and reach your real potential as a parent.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re struggling with setting up realistic boundaries with your kid, want to change communication patterns, or help them deal with mental health problems such as substance addiction, you’ll be able to get detailed information about any of these problems. As a result, you’ll have an opportunity to change your relationship with your child and improve their mental health and psychological well-being, as well as yours.
Bottom Line
Making the decision to turn to a family counselor isn’t easy. However, if you notice that your children experience serious problems and want to improve your communication with them as effectively as possible, you should think about receiving family counseling with parents and young adults.
So, if you’re looking for a new perspective on parenting your adolescent, consider taking the above-mentioned informational course for parents and children. But if you’ve already decided on receiving professional treatment, you can reach out to our licensed counselors at Health For Life Counseling Grand Rapids and let them help you deal with your problems.
