Parenting Counseling

The need for parenting counseling in our country is growing every day. Prospective parents enter these challenging stages of life quickly, without any education on marriage, preparation for parenthood, the difficulties they may encounter, or how to manage them.

Unfortunately, incidents of child neglect and abuse, missing children, child deaths, child marriage, and teenage motherhood in our society can prompt debate about whether having children should require a license.

Although requiring a license for parenthood may be debated as a violation of human rights and provoke strong reactions, the countless cases of child abuse and deaths today underscore the seriousness of this issue and the need to reconsider it with care.

As clinicians, we see that parents are a significant factor in the onset, exacerbation, or persistence of a very large proportion of the mental disorders we encounter in consultations. It is important to make a careful distinction here. This should not lead to the conclusion that mothers and fathers are the source of every mental illness. However, attitudes and behaviors within the family that predispose someone to illness, the parents’ personality traits, their ways of coping with stressors, any mental illnesses they may have, alcohol and substance use disorders, and their sociocultural and socioeconomic characteristics can create serious problems in managing the illness.

The influence of mothers and fathers on an individual’s life is not limited to mental illness; it can extend from attachment patterns in adulthood to academic achievement, from quality of life to ‘lifespan’, and can give rise to a community filled with trauma passed down from generation to generation. Life is the most fundamental right of every living being; failing to address every aspect of child abuse and deaths causes decay and corruption that grow and spread within the system, affecting every part of society, every individual, politics, education, justice, the family, a tree, a building’s support column, a dog, a woman, a child. This decay and corruption are irreversible.

At the point we have reached as a society today, a need has arisen to revise Maslow’s pyramid and add another basic need to those considered essential to sustaining life. That is the need to assign a mental health professional to every family.

With this in mind, without delay, the following steps must be taken:

1. Bring together the Ministry of Family and Social Policies, the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of Interior;
2. Recognize every couple as prospective ‘potential parents’ from the moment they apply to the official authorities to get married,
3. Assign these prospective parents to a psychiatrist,
4. Appoint a family mental health specialist to every family, just as a family physician is assigned,
5. Ensure that the assigned mental health professional provides the family with structured parenting coaching **(**By ensuring that this specialist provides the family with psychoeducation on sensitive issues such as managing the difficulties they may face while preparing for parenthood, supporting parent–child relationships after birth, and providing divorce counseling when needed)
6. Until sufficient infrastructure is in place in this field (such as training and appointing qualified specialists), provide social workers and psychology graduates with short courses in parenting coaching and family therapy and appoint them to these roles,
7. Begin these appointments in rural areas and provide free access (identify pilot provinces/districts)
8. Monitor families’ attendance at regular training sessions and mental health counseling,
9. Ensure that personality tests, social assessments, and random drug screenings are carried out during the couple’s application process (as with the tests required for infectious diseases), and that individuals in at-risk groups – such as those with addiction, involvement in crime, an unfavorable social assessment report, concerning personality inventory results, a chronic severe mental illness, or a history of suicide attempts – receive follow-up for at least 6 months to 1 year, even if no active mental disorder has currently been identified,
10. Ensure deterrence by imposing penalties on those who do not comply with the regulations.

For our girls Narin, Leyla, Sıla, and so many others, we need to reconsider our society’s sense of justice and values and rebuild ourselves as a society. I believe that developing a collective awareness in this area can only be achieved in the medium and long term by addressing society’s psychological well-being.

**Dr. Sibel Çakıtlı
**Psychiatrist