When Parenting Becomes Part of the Intervention: What Early Childhood Mental Health Research Can Teach Us About the Positive Systems Approach

There has always been something slightly uncomfortable about the way we sometimes talk about parenting when a child is struggling. When a young child becomes anxious, aggressive, withdrawn, oppositional, unusually demanding, or difficult to manage, attention often turns quickly toward what the parents should be doing differently. Perhaps the parents need to be more consistent. Perhaps they need to set firmer limits. Perhaps they need to use consequences more effectively. Perhaps they need to stop reinforcing the behaviour. Sometimes these suggestions are useful, but they can also lead us toward a very narrow understanding of what is actually happening.  Parenting does matter enormously but parenting does not occur in a vacuum.

As a grandfather of a 5 and 7 year old I can see first-hand today how parents are raising children while managing their own emotions, relationships, financial pressures, work demands, health concerns, cultural expectations, social supports, housing circumstances and, increasingly, the extraordinary demands of modern family life. Children, meanwhile, bring their own temperament, developmental history, neurological characteristics, communication abilities, emotional vulnerabilities and experiences to the relationship. The result is not a simple equation in which a particular parenting style produces a particular child outcome. It is a dynamic system in which parents influence children, children influence parents, and both are influenced by the larger environment surrounding the family.  This is often referred to as the “synergistic” effect of a system.

This is one of the reasons I was particularly interested in a new Perspective published in Nature Mental Health on September 16, 2026, entitled Supporting parenting in early childhood to foster human development and mental health. The authors, Jorge Cuartas and colleagues, bring together evidence concerning parenting, early childhood development and mental health and make an argument that is highly consistent with something I have been emphasizing throughout my work with families: if we want to change what is happening for a child, we often have to look beyond the child and beyond the immediate behaviour to the system in which that behaviour is occurring.

The authors begin with an important observation. Parents and caregivers are among the most influential people in a young child's development, but parenting itself is shaped by socioeconomic, cultural, social, cognitive, emotional and environmental circumstances. In other words, we cannot fully understand parenting without understanding the conditions under which parenting is taking place. At the same time, parenting experiences and practices can have lasting implications for children's cognitive, social and emotional development and mental health. That two-way relationship is important because it changes the question we ask.

Instead of simply asking, “What is the parent doing wrong?”, we might ask, “What is making it difficult for this parent to provide what this child needs, and what can we change in the larger system to make positive parenting more possible?”

That may sound like a subtle difference, but in practice it can lead us in a very different direction.  Imagine, for example, a young child who is having frequent emotional outbursts at home. The traditional response might be to focus immediately on the child's behaviour and then on the parent's response to that behaviour. We might recommend consequences, reward systems, time-outs or firmer boundaries. Yet before deciding what intervention is required, there are other questions worth asking. What does the child's day look like? How predictable are the routines? How much opportunity does the child have for positive interaction with the parent? Is the child getting enough sleep? Is there considerable conflict in the household? Is the parent exhausted? Is there financial or housing stress? Are the parents receiving support from one another or from extended family? Does the child have a developmental or communication difficulty that makes ordinary expectations particularly challenging? Does the parent have the time, emotional energy and practical resources required to respond consistently?  None of these questions removes responsibility from parents. Rather, they place parenting within its proper context.  This is very close to the heart of the Positive Systems Approach.

One of the central ideas in PSA is that behaviour is communication. When a child engages in disruptive or challenging behaviour, we are interested not simply in stopping the behaviour but in understanding what the behaviour may be telling us about the child and the environment. We look at antecedents, consequences, communication, reinforcement, coping, relationships, stimulation and the many other individual and system factors that can influence what happens next. The same principle applies to parenting itself.

A parent who repeatedly loses patience with a child may not simply be demonstrating a lack of parenting skill. The pattern may be telling us something about the system. Perhaps the parent has been responding to increasingly difficult behaviour for months and is exhausted. Perhaps two caregivers are responding in completely different ways. Perhaps the child behaves very differently at school than at home, suggesting that something about the home environment, expectations or relationships deserves closer examination. Perhaps the family has become caught in a cycle in which the child's behaviour increases parental stress, parental stress changes the way the parent responds, and that response then contributes to further escalation in the child.  Once we see that cycle, the intervention becomes much broader.

The Nature Mental Health Perspective is particularly useful in this regard because it focuses on two areas of parenting that have received considerable attention in the research: engagement in play and learning activities, and discipline and punishment. The authors describe engagement in learning and play as important ways in which caregivers can support children's cognitive, social and emotional development. These activities are not necessarily complicated or expensive. Reading together, talking, playing, exploring, responding to a child's interests and creating opportunities for shared learning can all provide experiences through which children develop language, problem-solving abilities, emotional understanding and a sense of connection.  There is something important here that can easily be missed when parenting is discussed primarily in terms of behaviour management.

A child does not develop only because adults successfully stop unwanted behaviour. Children develop through thousands of ordinary interactions in which someone talks with them, listens to them, plays with them, helps them solve a problem, notices what interests them, encourages an attempt, comforts them when something goes wrong and provides another opportunity to try. These experiences gradually build the child's sense of competence, security and relationship with the people around them.  From a PSA perspective, these are not simply pleasant additions to a behaviour program. They are part of the environment in which behaviour develops.

The discussion of discipline is equally important. The authors distinguish nonviolent forms of discipline from physical and psychological punishment and review evidence indicating that physical and psychological punishment are associated with longer-term developmental and mental-health risks. This is consistent with a substantial body of research examining the developmental consequences of harsh and physical punishment. For those of us who have spent many years working with challenging behaviour, this raises an interesting question. If our goal is to help a child develop self-regulation, communication, problem-solving and emotional resilience, what does the child actually learn from being frightened, humiliated or physically punished?  Punishment may sometimes suppress behaviour temporarily, particularly when the consequence is immediate and powerful, but suppression is not necessarily the same thing as learning. A child may learn what not to do without learning what to do instead. They may learn to avoid an adult rather than to communicate with that adult. They may become better at concealing behaviour rather than developing the skills necessary to manage the underlying emotion. And in some circumstances, repeated conflict between parent and child can become part of a larger negative cycle in which both become increasingly reactive.

The PSA perspective is not that children should have no boundaries. Quite the opposite. Children need structure, predictability, expectations and limits. But boundaries can be provided within relationships that remain safe, respectful and supportive. The objective is not simply to control behaviour in the moment; it is to create the conditions in which children can gradually develop the capacity to manage themselves.  This distinction becomes especially important when we consider children who already have developmental, neurological or mental-health vulnerabilities. A child with autism, ADHD, anxiety, a language disorder or difficulties with emotional regulation may experience ordinary demands very differently from another child. If the child repeatedly fails to meet expectations, the family can gradually become organized around correction. Adults correct, the child resists, adults increase their efforts to control, the child becomes more distressed, and everyone begins to anticipate the next difficult interaction.  At some point, the family may begin to describe the child as “the problem” but the problem may actually be the pattern.  That is one of the most powerful ideas within systems thinking: sometimes the most useful unit of intervention is not the individual person but the relationship between the person and the environment.

This is also why the Nature Mental Health authors' emphasis on ecological interventions and parenting-support programs is so important. Rather than assuming that the answer lies exclusively in changing the child, or even simply teaching parents a new set of techniques, they argue for approaches that recognize the broader ecological context in which parenting occurs. Parenting-support programs can help caregivers develop positive practices, but their effectiveness also depends upon whether families have the conditions and resources necessary to use those practices.  This is where the idea of parental support needs to move beyond the traditional parenting class.

Sometimes what a parent needs is information. Sometimes it is practical coaching. Sometimes it is help understanding a child's behaviour. Sometimes it is an opportunity to observe and practice new ways of responding. Sometimes it is support for the parent-child relationship. And sometimes the most important intervention may have very little to do with parenting technique at all. It may involve reducing family stress, improving access to community resources, addressing housing or financial difficulties, providing respite, strengthening social support, coordinating school and home expectations, or helping two caregivers develop a more consistent approach.  In other words, if the environment makes positive parenting difficult, telling parents to “parent better” may be an inadequate intervention.

This is one of the reasons the Positive Systems Approach has always placed such emphasis on the health of the system surrounding the individual. A positive system does not simply ask whether the child is behaving appropriately. It asks whether the adults are working together, whether expectations are realistic, whether routines are predictable, whether communication is effective, whether reinforcement is abundant, whether the environment is supportive, whether there are opportunities for success, and whether the people providing support have the resources and emotional capacity to sustain the approach.

The concept of team health, which is one of the system factors within PSA, becomes particularly relevant here. Parents are often expected to remain calm, consistent and emotionally available even when they are themselves overwhelmed. Yet the emotional state of caregivers is part of the system too. A stressed parent can have difficulty regulating a child's behaviour, while a child's chronic behavioural difficulties can contribute significantly to parental stress. The relationship therefore moves in both directions.  This does not mean that parents should feel guilty about their own stress. It means that parental wellbeing deserves to be considered part of the intervention.

There is also an important strength-based message here. When we talk about parenting in relation to mental health, it can be tempting to focus on what parents should stop doing. Stop yelling. Stop punishing. Stop reacting. Stop reinforcing inappropriate behaviour. Those changes may sometimes be necessary, but PSA also asks a different question: What can we add?  Can we increase positive interactions? Can we create more opportunities for shared enjoyment? Can we provide more non-contingent positive attention? Can we make routines more predictable? Can we teach the child a better way to communicate? Can we give parents more opportunities to experience success? Can we create moments in which the child and parent are working together rather than against one another?  These changes can alter the emotional climate of a family and when the emotional climate changes, behaviour can change with it.

This is perhaps the broader lesson emerging from the current research. Mental health should not be thought of only as something that resides inside an individual child and is then treated through an intervention directed at that child. Children's mental health develops within relationships, families, communities and broader social environments. Parenting is one important part of that environment, but parenting itself is embedded within a much larger ecology.  That perspective is especially relevant today because parents are frequently presented with an enormous amount of advice, much of it suggesting that if they simply use the correct strategy, their child's difficulties will improve. Real families are rarely that simple. Children differ. Parents differ. Cultures differ. Circumstances differ. What works beautifully in one family may be difficult or inappropriate in another.  A systems approach does not mean abandoning evidence-based parenting practices. It means putting those practices into context.

For me, that is where the connection between this new research and the Positive Systems Approach becomes particularly compelling. PSA asks us to move away from the idea that challenging behaviour is something located exclusively within the individual. Instead, we look at the interaction between the person and the systems around them. We ask what the behaviour communicates, what happens immediately before and after it, what skills may be missing, what relationships are involved, what environmental conditions may be contributing, and what changes might make success more likely.  When the person is a child, the family is one of the most important systems in that picture and when the family is struggling, the answer may not be to tell the family to try harder.  It may be to change the system so that trying differently becomes possible.

That is a very different way of thinking about parenting. It moves us away from blame and toward understanding. It moves us away from simply reacting to behaviour and toward prevention. It moves us away from asking how we can make a child behave and toward asking what we can do to create the conditions in which the child is more able to succeed.  Ultimately, this is what I believe the Positive Systems Approach contributes to the conversation about parenting and mental health. The child is never the whole system. The parent is never the whole system either. Both exist within a network of relationships, expectations, resources, stresses, opportunities and supports that continually influence what happens next.  If we want healthier children, we need to think about how we support parents. If we want to support parents, we need to think about the environments in which parents are raising their children. And if we want to change challenging behaviour, we need to look carefully at the systems that surround that behaviour. Sometimes the most important intervention is not something we do to the child - sometimes it is something we change around the child.  And sometimes, the most important thing we can change around the child is the support we provide to the people who are trying every day to help that child grow.

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References

Cuartas, J., Lansford, J. E., Backhaus, S., Freire, S., Jeong, J., et al. (2026). Supporting parenting in early childhood to foster human development and mental health. Nature Mental Health. Published September 16, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-026-00726-1

Backhaus, S., Leijten, P., Jochim, J., Melendez-Torres, G. J., & Gardner, F. (2023). Effects over time of parenting interventions to reduce physical and emotional violence against children: A systematic review and meta-analysis. eClinicalMedicine, 60, 102003.

Cuartas, J., Gershoff, E. T., Bailey, D. H., Gutiérrez, M. A., & McCoy, D. C. (2025). Physical punishment and lifelong outcomes in low- and middle-income countries: A systematic review and multilevel meta-analysis. Nature Human Behaviour, 9, 1365–1379.

Jeong, J., Franchett, E. E., Ramos de Oliveira, C. V., Rehmani, K., & Yousafzai, A. K. (2021). Parenting interventions to promote early child development in the first three years of life: A global systematic review and meta-analysis. PLoS Medicine, 18, e1003602.

Prime, H., et al. (2023). Positive parenting and early childhood cognition: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 26, 362–400.

World Health Organization, UNICEF, & World Bank Group. (2018). Nurturing Care for Early Childhood Development: A Framework for Helping Children Survive and Thrive to Transform Health and Human Potential.