Lack of child therapy puts strain on parent groups

A retired GP says parent support groups are having to be created due to a lack of quality therapy services for young people.

Alison Graham, chair and trustee of the Young People's Counselling Service (YPCS), said "moral and creative" ideas were needed in response to a lack of funding in the children's mental health sector.

The group, set up in Yaxley, Peterborough, aims to help parents support their children through advice and shared experiences in a shame free environment.

Ms Graham said: "Things are worse now than when I first became a GP 30 years ago and I think that's that's a horrible observation."

YPCS was set up due to "very little high quality service for therapy and young people 30 years ago," Ms Graham said.

The charity provided free therapy services for children and young people until last year due to a lack of regular outside funding.

She said while there were some "amazing individuals doing great work", the underfunding of mental health services and the way the system was set up was not always fit for purpose.

Ms Graham said: "As a parent myself... and as a professional I saw firsthand how utterly broken the system is, how inefficient, how underfunded and driven by balancing the books... which is not how you invest in the generation that's coming.

She added: "My first patient may have been the child, but then the parents become patients because of the stress and their siblings become patients... it has an impact on the wider family."

The support group began in early September and meets every two weeks on a Wednesday from 18:00 GMT to 20:00.

Ms Graham said some parents would be "blamed" for their child's challenging behavior and sent to parenting courses, which were not always useful for parents with neurodivergent children or who had experienced trauma.

She called for more more support groups in the region to give parents a shame-free space to ask for advice from others with lived experience.

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