The appropriate involvement of parents in adolescent psychotherapy is one of the most clinically nuanced aspects of this work, and it is something Dr. Steinbok navigates explicitly at his Boca Raton practice rather than applying a single policy to all adolescent cases. The primary therapeutic relationship is always with the young patient, and the confidentiality that makes that relationship workable requires that parents not have access to the content of sessions. At the same time, parents are not peripheral to the process: the family dynamics within which the adolescent is developing are part of the clinical context, and a parent's understanding of what their teenager is dealing with, and what the treatment is trying to accomplish, often makes a meaningful difference to whether the work succeeds.
In practice, Dr. Steinbok typically meets with parents at the outset of adolescent treatment to gather their perspective on what is happening and to establish the parameters of communication during the ongoing work. Periodic check-ins with parents, at intervals and with content determined by the clinical situation, are part of how he maintains that connection without compromising the teenager's sense that the therapeutic space belongs to them. For families in Boca Raton where the parent-adolescent relationship is itself a significant part of what needs to be addressed, conjoint sessions or parallel individual work with parents are sometimes incorporated alongside the adolescent's individual therapy.
