My Observation of Parents Written by Josh McManus
Over the last several years, there’s a recurring pattern that I have taken notice of. A mother describes her teen’s emotional meltdowns in detail, then mentions as an aside that she feels like she hasn't slept more than five hours for weeks. A father brings his 10 year old son in for neurofeedback, and when I ask how he is doing personally, he laughs and says, "Ask me after we fix him." There's usually nothing to fix in the way he means, but that doesn’t make this any less significant. There's a kid who's struggling, without a doubt. But there's also a parent quietly crumbling in the background.
I work both as a neurofeedback technician as well as an outpatient therapist and have noticed this trend in both avenues of my clinical work. Neurofeedback in particular attracts parents who've researched every intervention available for their child's ADHD, anxiety, or dysregulation. Something that is striking is how rarely those same parents consider it for themselves. When I ask a parent if they’ve thought about a few sessions of their own, they often look at me like I've suggested something indulgent. "I don't really have time for that” or “it’s really more for them” are common responses I hear when I bring it up.
The research backs this up. Survey data shows that adults without children at home are considerably more likely to be current or former therapy clients than parents are, even though most therapy-goers are within prime child-rearing age (Lange et al., 2022). This is a gap researchers largely attribute to parents' limited time, money, and bandwidth, all being genuine factors that play into one’s ability to engage in talk therapy or neurofeedback.
Stigma plays a role too. Studies on parents of children with mental health concerns describe "affiliate stigma," a secondhand shame absorbed from a child's diagnosis, which often pushes parents to keep any treatment private and under wraps. One study found a parent's own history of mental healthcare was itself linked to how much stigma they perceived, as if seeking help for yourself invites judgment that seeking help for your child doesn't (Drent et al., 2022). Separately, surveyed adults widely believed a parent would feel like a personal failure if their child needed treatment. If getting your child help already risks that verdict, getting help for yourself can feel like confirming it, and that is a feeling that many parents would often rather avoid.
The research on family treatment is stacked in favor of treating the parent, not just the child. Randomized trials on parent-directed interventions repeatedly find that children improve more when parents receive direct coaching than when treatment focuses on the child alone (Lange et al., 2022). I've watched this firsthand: a child's anxiety softened not from anything in his own sessions, but because his mother finally addressed her own. A teenager's outbursts eased after her father reluctantly did sessions working on emotional regulation. While improvement in symptoms in children and adolescents is likely, the deepest changes often occur when multiple members of the larger system pursue change.
My personal theory: parenting a struggling child activates something protective that curdles into a sort of self-neglect. Taking care of yourself starts to feel like stealing resources from your kid, even when it's the opposite. Most parents already believe in therapy. They prove it weekly by sitting in the waiting room. They just haven't taken that belief and pointed it towards themselves. If you're the parent who booked the appointment for your kid and never once considered booking one for yourself, I'd recommend considering it for yourself. Not because something's broken in you, but because it may be one of the most effective things you can do for the child you're already fighting so hard to help. Improving your mental health can have nothing but a positive effect on your child’s wellbeing.
