Season 2 Ep 2: Managing Extended Family Stress Without Adding to Parenting Worry

In this episode we will discuss an important finding from Bowen family systems theory: parents can detour our troubles onto our children. This is described as parents projecting the worry onto the offspring. 

Dr Carrie Collier will help us to think about this issue and address our build up of worry about children. 

• How to make sense of the way issues in broader family relationships can increase a worry focus on children.
• How issues with our siblings, cut-offs with parents, or the death of a parent/grandparent can play out in our parenting.
• How a narrow focus on parenting techniques misses these important family issues.

Hear more from Dr Carrie Collier:

• Finding a Self in Parenting: When a parent is concerned about a child, it’s easy for anxiety to take over. An anxious focus on a child can make it difficult for a parent to access their best thinking, or to observe the larger family system and their role in it. In this edition of Family Matters, Dr. Carrie Collier shares her thoughts about how a parent can begin to take responsibility for their emotional reactivity in response to a parenting challenge. She discusses what it takes to shift one’s focus from solving a child’s dilemma to managing oneself in the midst of chaos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpOaOFnHOqE
• https://www.thebowencenter.org/faculty-bios/carrie-collier
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpOaOFnHOqE
• https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/anzf.1491