By Meg O. Lukan, MS, LCPC
Founder, Lukan Clinical Counseling, PLLC | Algonquin, Illinois
If Freud were alive today, he’d have an app and roughly a six month waitlist. Parenting has become a performance sport, complete with emotional metrics, curated vulnerability, and endless reels reminding you that your child’s fidgeting means you’ve failed to “co-regulate.” Somewhere between the mindful-parenting movement and trauma-informed everything, a quiet panic emerged: every meltdown feels diagnosable. But what if we’ve mistaken being emotionally aware for being perpetually alarmed?
As psychologist Jonathan Haidt observes in The Anxious Generation, we’ve built a culture that tries to shield children from every discomfort. In our effort to make childhood safe, we’ve made it brittle. Add to that a social media landscape filled with pastel advice on “gentle parenting,” and suddenly every developmental quirk starts to look like a red flag.
Millennial parents vowed not to repeat their Boomer parents’ emotional distance. Jean Twenge notes in Generations that many Millennials wanted to raise kids who felt seen and heard, which is a deeply admirable goal. But in the process, parenting has drifted toward overcorrection, where constant analysis replaces common sense. Jessica Lahey, in The Gift of Failure, reminds us that resilience grows from struggle, not from its removal. Yet today, a child’s frustration or sadness is often interpreted as trauma in progress. Parents intervene quickly, mistaking ordinary development for a psychological emergency.
After more than thirty-three years in clinical practice many working with children under 10 years old, I’ve seen this pattern grow louder with every scroll and algorithmic suggestion.
Parents aren’t irrational; they’re inundated. The cultural noise is deafening.
A five-year-old refusing broccoli isn’t defiant; they’re learning agency. A seven-year-old fibbing about brushing their teeth isn’t manipulative; they’re testing boundaries. A nine-year-old who craves solitude isn’t depressed; they’re recalibrating from overstimulation. In seven out of ten cases in my practice, the issue resolves once parents receive targeted coaching and
skill-building, without their loved one ever attending a session. The problem usually isn’t the child; it’s the confusion between age-appropriate and alarming.
This isn’t a parental failure oftentimes, it is a professional one. While universities are racing to produce new clinicians to meet demand, many graduates now enter private practice immediately as interns or provisional therapists. Historically, private practice was reserved for clinicians who had first gained five to seven years of experience in hospitals, community agencies, or group settings. The beginning of a clinical career was almost always spent learning the landscape of care, understanding severity, and refining clinical judgment under real supervision. Those early years built the muscle memory of sound therapeutic instincts. Today, that apprenticeship is often bypassed. Parents are rarely told what “intern” or “provisional” actually means, or that supervision may be minimal. Inexperience isn’t a moral failing, it’s simply a stage but when it’s paired with inadequate oversight and glossy marketing, families may not realize the expertise gap until months of “therapy” yield little more than invoices.
And then there’s the comforting illusion that if you can just send your child into a therapy office for fifty minutes while you relax with your well deserved Starbucks, there will magically be an emotional upgrade,and everything will recalibrate. It’s tidy. It’s efficient. It’s fiction. Therapy isn’t a car wash. Children don’t change in isolation; they change in context, through consistent modeling at home. Psychiatrist Daniel Siegel put it best in Parenting from the Inside Out: to help your child regulate, you have to regulate yourself. The best therapy often begins with the parent, not the child. A good therapist won’t replace you in the process, rather they’ll help you lead it.
Meanwhile, the digital environment keeps turning up the heat. According to Common Sense Media, the average child now spends more waking hours with screens than with their parents. That endless feed of highlight reels distorts what’s considered “normal,” for both kids and adults. As Haidt warns, we’re raising a generation under digital hypnosis with less play, less autonomy, more anxiety. Children don’t need another appointment; they need unstructured time, dirt under their nails, and space to figure themselves out. And parents? They need less comparison.
Modern parenting has become a public performance scored in real time by the internet. Every tantrum is met with comment threads diagnosing “attachment trauma” or “nervous system dysregulation.” No wonder so many parents feel pressure to outsource help, they’re being publicly graded on their child’s behavior.
Development is messy; it’s supposed to be. Tantrums at four are normal. Mood swings at nine are normal. Boundary-testing at ten is normal. The job of a parent isn’t to sanitize discomfort, it is to guide it. Real red flags exist, of course: sustained aggression, self-harm, regression, or ongoing impairment deserve immediate support. But not every hard moment needs professional intervention. Over diagnosis has crept so far into the culture that we now pathologize humanity itself.
If you’re a parent wrestling with where that line falls, start by working with a licensed therapist for advisory and navigation sessions to provide strategies to handle challenges with children. In my experience, seven out of ten families of children under ten find resolution there, before the child requires therapy. That’s not a sales pitch; it’s a recalibration of responsibility. Our profession needs to empower parents again and to remind them that growth, frustration, and imperfection are not pathologies but prerequisites for development. Kids need to play. Parents need to trust themselves. Everyone needs fewer checkboxes.
Jonathan Haidt once wrote in The Happiness Hypothesis that “happiness comes from between”. Between you and others, not from constant self-inspection. The same is true for families.
Connection, and not diagnosis is the true foundation of emotional health. So before you add another appointment to the calendar, pause. Ask: Is this truly a crisis, or just childhood doing its job? Sometimes the best therapy isn’t a session at all, it’s an afternoon outside, away from devices, letting kids be gloriously, developmentally human.
If you’re unsure where that line falls, start with support for yourself. Partner with a licensed clinician who can guide you through evidence-based parent training. The goal isn’t perfection; it’s confidence. You don’t need to outsource your parenting, you just need to upgrade your understanding. Most importantly, understand that you will make mistakes, we all do. And your child? They probably just need more playtime and the entire family could benefit from one less appointment.
About the Author
Meg O. Lukan MS, LCPC is the Founder of Lukan Clinical Counseling, PLLC, located in Algonquin, Illinois. A therapist for over thirty-three years, she has been licensed in Arizona, Texas and Illinois. Meg is known for blending evidence-based therapies to help clients achieve measurable, lasting change. She offers in-person sessions and tele-health therapy and consulting services. Clients describe her as approachable yet direct, and refreshingly real.
When she’s not in session, Meg can be found in a fitness or hot-yoga class, tending her vertical garden (only the penthouse suite for her plants), or planning her next adventure with her husband of 30 years and their two grown sons.
