Open Door

Support for Parents

There are two ways in which we work with the parents of young people.

1. Parenting Teenagers Project (PTP)

This service is for the parents of teenagers (aged 12 up) and young adults (up to 21 years); it is usually targeted at parents who are worried about a young person who does not want to access or accept help themselves. But we can be flexible depending on family needs and circumstances. In some cases parents are worried that their relationships with their teenage children has broken down, or are worried about behaviour or difficulties at school or college. We help with any worries parents may have including emotional problems, truancy, non-communication, drug misuse, illness (including mental illness), defiance and many more.

The PTP offers a block of six appointments with a qualified and experienced parent advisor, this provides time to talk about your feelings and help with assessing the difficulties with your teenager. The appointments aim to help you understand your feelings, think about your teenager’s feelings and difficulties, and explore options and strategies for dealing with your situation. This service provides encouragement and support for more effective parenting.

The Open Door Parenting Teenagers Project is currently a London wide service. It accepts referrals from parents themselves and from professionals. The service offers daytime and evening appointments, there is likely to be a longer wait for evening appointments.

All parents are invited to assist us gather information and data about the problems they are experiencing by completing questionnaires. This information has been invaluable in helping us to develop the service during the past 8 years; we have been able to demonstrate that parents attending the PTP report statistically significant improvements and changes in their feelings and feel more able to function as parents.

The Parenting Teenagers Project has received funding from the Big Lottery for the next four years to develop the service to parents even more widely than at present. While we shall continue to offer our core service at our base in Crouch End, we shall also be looking at new creative methods of working with parents and supporting them with their task of parenting adolescents. This means that we shall offer workshops and group meetings in local centres, schools etc., and also providing interpreting or some language advisors to reach parents from all ethnic and cultural groups.

Click here for contact details.

2. Parent / Teen Brief Therapy Service
When a young person is 12 –14 years old, and their parent contacts us, we may suggest that the young person and parent/s come together for the first of six appointments. This usually helps the younger teenager to gain confidence and feel able to attend four one-to-one appointments with the therapist. The sixth appointment is usually used to meet again with the parent and young person together.

Everything the young person says to the therapist is confidential and is not discussed with anyone outside of Open Door. The young person and therapist decide what would be helpful to discuss and share with their parent(s) in the final appointment. The only exception is if the therapist feels that the young person is seriously at risk in which case they will explain to the young person that they have a legal duty to talk to the parent, or another responsible adult, about the risk or danger, and will work out how best to approach this with the young person.