Parenting Counseling with Empathy

Being a parenting counselor is a profession that may be best handled by someone who is a parent. I feel I can say this as I was one of those parenting counselors who did not have children. Although, I did have an advanced degree related to parenting counseling and psychology and was actually fairly adept at observing parents and children I was not able to talk with them from a position of having been in their shoes.

It is not uncommon to overhear someone who does not have children, say things like" If you'd do this, your kid would mind you", or "When I have kids, they will never act like that". There is an old saying about walking in my shoes for a day that seems to be apropos in these situations. When someone has not worn your kind of shoes, they really don't know what they are talking about. Parenting is not as easy as it looks, not by a long shot. Parenting counseling from a non parent perspective, takes a couple of added ingredients: empathy and boundaries.

Empathy is defined as the capacity to identify with and share another person's feelings. Experience as a parent gives a parenting counselor the ability to relate to other parents from a common point of view. This common point of view though needs to be tempered through boundaries. The key is to be genuinely empathic without letting your own experience cause a counter-transference or seep into the parenting counselor relationship.

Counter-transference in a professional relationship is the redirection of a parenting counselor's emotional feelings with their client. The parenting counselor has overstepped professional boundaries when they let their "stuff" (emotional feelings) get mixed up with the client's "stuff". A parenting counselor must keep close tabs on their how their own feelings and emotions are surfacing in the parent counselor relationship.

It is not uncommon for clients to try to manipulate the parenting counselor in one way or another. An easy line of manipulation is to forge an alliance around the fact that the parenting counselor is also a parent. Once a parent counselor recognizes the client is attempting to transfer responsibility to the parent counselor, the parent counselor can address this with their client and talk about their unconscious need to forge a complicit alliance.

Parenting counselors need to be empathic but there needs to also be boundaries maintained. Empathy can lead to transference and counter-transference. Parenting counselors who are aware of this are able to use this process to help their clients understand themselves and to move forward in the clinical relationship.

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