Our highly experienced team bring together their professional expertise and their own experience as parents, to offer help with the emotional stresses and relationship difficulties that can arise at each stage of parenthood, from deciding to start a family, right through to the experience of your children leaving home. Our North London psychotherapy centre is a unique service within the private sector for counselling in London.
Research shows that professional help in these areas can lead to lasting benefits for the well-being of parents and their children and enable more confident and effective parenting.
Current national and international research highlights the need to rethink how services can best help parents and their children. It has become Increasingly clear that the mental health and emotional well-being of parents needs to be prioritised, rather than simply focusing on the physical aspects of pregnancy and birth; the technical skills of parenting or tackling children's behaviour problems. At Facing Parenthood the emotional well-being of parents-to- be, mothers, fathers and couples is our priority.
We provide a number of different services:
Counselling for Fertility Problems
Preparing for Parenthood
Pregnancy and the first year (Perinatal Clinical Service)
Parenting Toddlers to teens and Beyond
Support Through Transitions
Individual, Couple and Family Consultations
Facing Parenthood Groups and Workshops
Our
counselling for fertility service offers help with the emotional aspects of undergoing fertility investigations or treatments. Struggling with infertility can put huge pressures on women and men and a couple's emotional and sexual relationship. The cycles of hope and disappointment can painfully dominate the lives of women and men, often silently, sometimes for many years. Coping with difficulties with fertility may cause depression, anxiety and difficulties in your relationship . Secondary infertility, when you have one child or more, but long for another, can also be a source of considerable and enduring pain. We offer individual, couple and family consultations to help with these emotional challenges and the psychological aspects of surrogacy and adoption . We also run groups to help non-biological parents talk to their children about their biological origins.
Our
Preparing for Parenthood Service aims to help families get off to a good start by helping ordinary mothers and fathers-to-be, prepare emotionally for becoming parents and offering support when they do. It is designed to build confidence, reduce anxiety and help parents to understand and get to know their baby. By focusing on the personal and emotional aspects of parenthood, we complement ante-natal services that focus more on the physical preparation for birth.
We developed this service in response to a growing body of evidence, that offering parents help with the emotional aspects of parenthood before and after the birth of their baby can have long-term benefits for the psychological well-being of parents, for their relationship with each other and for their parenting. It has also been shown to lead to long term benefits for their children's emotional social and intellectual development.
Our
Preparing for Parenthood groups and consultations, designed in light of this evidence, aim to offer these kind of benefits by addressing your
psychological
experiences and struggles as parents-to-be and as new parents. We also aim to reduce your stress and anxiety. Research indicates that high levels of ante and post natal stress, can be associated the development of the emotional, cognitive and behavioural problems in children. So here the aim is to help prevent the development of these problems as well as improving your own emotional well-being.
At Facing Parenthood our dedicated multidisciplinary team of highly trained and experienced professionals offer the early specialist clinical assessment and therapy that can best help expectant and new parents and their babies with difficulties during pregnancy and the first year and help to prevent these difficulties from becoming enduring problems. We offer help ranging from single consultations to ongoing therapy.
We know that when it comes to pre and post - natal problems, early psychological therapy has been shown to be the treatment of choice.The most recent guidelines on antenatal and postnatal mental health (2007) from NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence) reflect this and recommend that talking therapies should be more readily available for women who are pregnant or breastfeeding, because of the increased risk of using medicines at these times. Pre and postnatal difficulties may include: depression, anxiety, panic, eating disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder and post traumatic stress.
We also offer help to parents who are struggling with the many and extraordinary emotional challenges of parenthood, at any stage, from infancy right through to caring for adult children. Our Parenting Toddlers to Teens and Beyond Service focuses on providing psychological help for concerns linked to these later stages of parenting, particularly during points of transition such as toddlerhood, the arrival of a new sibling, starting school, adolescence and leaving home.
Support Through Transitions offers a series of consultations aimed to ease the transition from one developmental stage to the next. We offer six consultations tailored to address the issues specific to each stage of development. Your concerns may be with your own feelings, your relationship with your partner or your children
At Facing Parenthood we have developed a range of services specifically aimed at helping fathers and fathers- to-be, because we appreciate that being a father faces men with particular psychological challenges. We also recognise the central role fathers play in the emotional well-being of their partner and their children.
Facing Parenthood offers pre- and post-natal groups and workshops for mothers, fathers and couples. Our perinatal programme, covering pregnancy and the first year, offers groups and workshops for pregnant women, for couples expecting a baby and for couples and new mothers with their babies.
We also offer a further range of groups and workshops for fathers and for parents of toddlers, primary school children, adolescents, children leaving home and for those parenting through and after divorce.
Individual, Couple and Family Consultations are available for a range of emotional and psychological difficulties and to discuss any concerns linked to fertility, pregnancy, birth and parenthood. All groups, workshops and consultations are offered by chartered psychologists and registered psychotherapists.
Professional bodies:
Facing Parenthood is allied to the Independent Psychology Service, a network of psychologists, psychotherapists and psychiatrists in private practice.
020 8883 9685