Building a case for good parenting in a family therapy systemic environment: resisting blame and accounting for children's behaviour

Abstract

Systemic family therapy promotes a systemic reframing of individual problems to an understanding of the familial processes influencing family functioning. Parents often attend therapy identifying their child as the key problem, which raises issues of accountability and blame. In this article, we explored the discursive practices used by parents for constructing themselves as ‘good parents’. Using the basic principles of conversation analysis and discursive psychology, we analysed actual therapeutic sessions and found that parents used a range of strategies to display their good parenting. This included directly claiming to be a good parent, illustrating how they act in their child's best interests, showing that they parent in appropriate ways and by making appeals to scientific rhetoric. It was concluded that family therapists have a challenging task in managing competing versions of events and we discussed implications for practice.Practitioner points Parents tend to blame their children for the problems experienced and this blaming tends to be done in front of the children during the therapy. By being explicitly aware of the discursive strategies parents employ in therapy, therapists can reflect on how to manage these challenging conversational practices. Conversation analysis may serve as a tool to support reflection, as therapists examine their own interactions during the therapy.