If you feel you or your family could be helped by talking through a mental health issue, or you feel that psychotherapeutic input might be right for you, then please do get in touch.
Our clinicians are available to talk through your concerns over the phone and can advise as to whether therapeutic help might be beneficial. We offer appointments throughout the day and run evening clinics throughout the week, including Saturdays. We are also able to offer sessions via Zoom where we feel this is clinically appropriate.
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The Open Door Approach to Parenting Teenagers (APT) is a brief, manualised intervention designed to support parents of adolescents (typically 11–21) who are feeling stuck, stressed, or worried about their relationship with their teenager.
The focus is on strengthening the parent–teen relationship and supporting parents to respond with greater emotional steadiness, clarity, and confidence during a challenging developmental stage.
APT is typically delivered as a short series of individual sessions with a practitioner, rather than a group programme. The work stays close to the real-life dilemmas parents face with teenagers — conflict, withdrawal, risk-taking, emotional volatility, or breakdowns in communication. Sessions help parents slow down and think more clearly about what may be happening beneath the behaviour, how patterns escalate, and what responses are most likely to keep the relationship open and workable. The approach is practical and reflective: it supports parents to tolerate strong feelings, reduce unhelpful cycles, and strengthen boundaries and connection. The emphasis is not on blame, but on understanding and on restoring a more constructive parent–teen relationship.
APT has published early-stage evidence from a real-world evaluation suggesting good acceptability and retention, with reported reductions in parental stress and improvements in parent–adolescent relationship measures following the intervention (Desatnik et al., 2021). This is encouraging, particularly because many parenting programmes struggle to retain parents who are highly stressed or hard to engage. A randomised evaluation (APT vs waiting list) has also been planned and ethically approved within the UK, reflecting an ongoing trajectory of evidence-building (Health Research Authority, 2018). APT may be especially suitable for parents who prefer an individual format, are reluctant to attend groups, or are seeking relationship-focused support rather than skills-only training.
“Teenagers can evoke intense feelings in parents — worry, anger, helplessness — especially when communication breaks down. APT helps parents think clearly under pressure: to understand what might be driving the pattern, and to respond in a way that keeps the relationship open while holding firm, workable boundaries.”
