In the midst of child and adolescent mental health challenges, parents often speak with us about the grief they experience for the loss of their hopes and dreams as a parent. In particular, they discuss their dream of being a parent and how, under the stress of a crisis, they’ve fallen away from this role. 

When a young person is experiencing distress, they often feel and act in ways that parents are unsure how to handle. Our intuitions and the skills we have learnt feel inadequate to manage the situation, and may even push us to act in unhelpful ways. Many parents find themselves unable to parent; instead, they transition into other roles, such as those of a psychiatrist, lawyer, or social worker.

Families can be understood as systems, where every part influences all the others. When one family member is in discord, it impacts all the rest. Just as a young person’s distress can shift the parent-child relationship and the parent’s role in the family, so too can a parent’s discord affect the well-being and behaviours of a young person. 

When parents move out of their parenting role and unhelpful parenting styles develop, a young person’s recovery can become more difficult.

This means that supporting parents is crucial for a young person’s recovery. Parenting support strengthens the recovery journey of both the young person and their family. It helps parents transition back into their parenting role, developing the skills and confidence to support their child with their additional concerns and needs.

The Wave Clinic’s Parenting Intensive Programs

Our parenting intensive programs combine the lessons of months of outpatient therapy into a few days. They offer parenting support for families where children may have an eating disorder, borderline personality disorder, high levels of emotional dysregulation, or cutting and other self-harming behaviours. 

Our three to five-day parenting intensive programs centre around:

• Looking at the history of a family and how its patterns and structures have developed
• Understanding how transgenerational trauma impacts the family system and family relationships
• Developing practical strategies to bring parents back to their parenting role

Parenting intensive programs involve six hours of therapy each day, alongside one hour of out-of-session reflection. Follow-up care includes up to two therapy sessions each week with a therapist from our team, depending on the family’s needs. 

We recommend that parents come to our treatment spaces in Kuala Lumpur or Dubai for our three or five-day program, to work with us in person. If this isn’t possible, we also offer parenting intensives online.

Joining Our Parenting Intensive Programs

Parents can enquire about our parenting intensive programs by emailing fiona@thewaveclinic.com. We’ll reply with a preliminary phone call to understand their needs and see how we can move forward together.

After our phone call, we’ll conduct an initial assessment to make sure that our programs, methods, and values are the right fit for a family. This will include a psychological and psychiatric evaluation. Our primary aim is to ensure the safety of each family, as well as our capacity to build skills and grow together.

Once we’re sure that we’re a good fit, we’ll provide a second assessment online to help us plan the program structure and session content. Then we’ll schedule the dates and practicalities of the three or five-day program.

Program Logistics

The cost of flights and accommodation isn’t included in our treatment fees. Parents participating in our programs in person usually stay in a nearby hotel, which we can recommend. Both our first and second assessments are charged for.