Parenting & Attachment Therapy in Charlotte, NC
Parenting is one of the most meaningful—and most challenging—roles a person can take on. For many caregivers, it brings up their own childhood experiences, emotional patterns, and relationship histories. When stress, trauma, or uncertainty enters the picture, these internal dynamics can begin to impact how parents connect with their children.
At Queen City Counseling & Consulting, we help parents and caregivers better understand their parenting style—and, when appropriate, recognize the influence of their own attachment history—strengthen emotional bonds with their children, and build healthier attachment patterns that support long-term wellbeing for both children and adults.
Understanding Attachment and Parenting Styles
Attachment refers to the emotional bond between a child and their primary caregiver. This bond lays the foundation for how children learn to regulate emotions, form relationships, and see themselves and the world as they grow.
The four commonly recognized attachment styles include:
Secure Attachment
Anxious Attachment
Avoidant Attachment
Disorganized Attachment
These early attachment experiences often shape how individuals relate to others later in life, including how they approach closeness, trust, emotional expression, and conflict.
Parenting styles are the patterns of behavior, communication, and emotional responsiveness parents use when interacting with their children. These styles play a central role in shaping a child’s attachment style and emotional development.
The four commonly recognized parenting styles include:
Authoritative Parenting
High warmth, high structure
Parents set clear boundaries while remaining emotionally responsive
Encourages independence while providing support
Impact on children
Children raised with authoritative parenting tend to develop secure attachment, better emotional regulation, higher self-esteem, and stronger social skills.
Authoritarian Parenting
Low warmth, high control
Focus on obedience and strict rules, often with limited emotional attunement
Impact on children
Children may become compliant but struggle with anxiety, low self-confidence, suppressed emotional expression, or difficulty forming healthy boundaries.
Permissive Parenting
High warmth, low structure
Very emotionally responsive but limited boundaries or consistent consequences
Impact on children
Children may struggle with impulse control, emotional regulation, and respecting limits. They may feel loved but lack a sense of safety through consistency.
Uninvolved / Neglectful Parenting
Low warmth, low structure
Minimal emotional engagement or supervision
Impact on children
This style is strongly associated with insecure attachment and may lead to difficulties with trust, emotional regulation, self-worth, and forming close relationships later in life.
Attachment Styles and Their Long-Term Effects
Early attachment patterns often continue to influence individuals well into adulthood, shaping romantic relationships, friendships, parenting behaviors, and self-image. In adulthood, attachment styles are often described in terms of how individuals relate to others emotionally.
Some common adult attachment styles include:
Secure Attachment: Comfort with closeness and independence, ability to express needs and emotions.
Anxious Attachment: Fear of abandonment, need for reassurance, heightened emotional sensitivity.
Avoidant Attachment: Discomfort with closeness, emotional distancing, difficulty relying on others.
Disorganized Attachment: Conflicting behaviors around intimacy, often linked to trauma or inconsistent caregiving.
When left unaddressed, insecure attachment patterns can contribute to:
Ongoing relationship challenges
Difficulty regulating emotions
Conflict with children or partners
Anxiety, depression, or unresolved trauma
The good news: attachment patterns are not permanent. With intentional work and support, individuals and families can build more secure patterns of connection.
How to Recognize Parenting & Attachment Challenges
You may benefit from support if you notice:
Frequent power struggles or emotional disconnection with your child
Difficulty setting or maintaining healthy boundaries
Feeling easily overwhelmed, reactive, or emotionally shut down during conflict
Guilt, shame, or confusion about your parenting approach
Repeating patterns from your own childhood that no longer feel helpful
Your child struggling with anxiety, behavior challenges, emotional outbursts, or withdrawal
These challenges do not mean you are failing as a parent — they simply reflect areas where guidance, tools, and support can help strengthen your family system.
How Therapy Can Help Strengthen Relationships
At Queen City Counseling & Consulting, we provide a compassionate and non-judgmental space for parents and families to explore their relationships and patterns. Our clinicians utilize evidence-based approaches, including Attachment-Based Family Therapy, to help families:
Improve communication and emotional connection
Build trust and repair relational ruptures
Understand and shift unhelpful parenting patterns
Strengthen emotional regulation and conflict resolution skills
Support parents in responding instead of reacting
We believe that healing happens within relationships. Strengthening attachment not only supports children but helps parents heal and grow as individuals as well.
Support for Parents, Children, and Families
Parenting is not meant to be navigated alone. Whether you are struggling with behavioral challenges, connection issues, or simply want to build a stronger bond with your child, our team is here to help.
We work with children, teens, young adults, and parents across all stages of development, offering individual therapy, family therapy, and attachment-focused interventions to meet your family’s unique needs.
Schedule an Appointment Today
If you are looking for support around parenting challenges, attachment concerns, or strengthening family relationships, Queen City Counseling & Consulting is here for you.
Call us today at (704) 457-8222 to schedule an appointment or request a consultation online.
Parenting/Attachment Resources
Reputable websites for additional resources
ATTach: Association for Training on Trauma and Attachment in Children: a coalition of parents, professionals, and caregivers: https://attach.org/about/
National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI): https://www.nami.org/
Books Recommendations by our Clinicians
The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults by Frances E Jenson and Amy Ellis Nutt
Dr. Frances E. Jensen is chair of the department of neurology in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. As a mother, teacher, researcher, clinician, and frequent lecturer to parents and teens, she is in a unique position to explain to readers the workings of the teen brain. In The Teenage Brain, Dr. Jensen gathers what we’ve discovered about adolescent brain function, wiring, and capacity and explains the science in the contexts of everyday learning and multitasking, stress and memory, sleep, addiction, and decision-making. In this groundbreaking yet accessible book, these findings also yield practical suggestions that will help adults and teenagers negotiate the mysterious world of adolescent development.
Stop Walking on Eggshells for Parents: How to Help Your Child (of Any Age) with Borderline Personality Disorder without Losing Yourself by Randi Kreger, Chrisinte Adamec MBA, Daniel S.Lobel PhD and Fran L.Porter, MA Bed.
If you have a child with BPD, you are all-too-aware of the behavioral and emotional issues that are linked to this disorder—including rages, self-harm, sexual acting out, substance abuse, suicidal behaviors, physical and emotional attacks, and more. With this comprehensive resource, you will learn all about borderline personality disorder, how it shows up in children, adolescents, and your adult children, how to obtain proper treatment, and how to manage your child’s condition at home. You’ll find proven-effective strategies to help you communicate and improve your relationship with your child of any age, and, as a result, improve your own life as a parent and an individual. You’ll also find real stories and advice from parents who have also experienced raising a child with BPD.
Most importantly, you’ll learn how to maintain boundaries and validate your child while also meeting your own needs. Whether your child is 5 or 25, this book offers tools to help you and your family thrive.
Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents
With anxiety at epidemic levels among our children, Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents offers a contrarian yet effective approach to help children and teens push through their fears, worries, and phobias to ultimately become more resilient, independent, and happy. Reid Wilson, PhD, and Lynn Lyons, LICSW, share their unconventional approach of stepping into uncertainty in a way that is currently unfamiliar but infinitely successful. Using current research and contemporary examples, the book exposes the most common anxiety-enhancing patterns—including reassurance, accommodation, avoidance, and poor problem solving—and offers a concrete plan with 7 key principles that foster change. And, since new research reveals how anxious parents typically make for anxious children, the book offers exercises and techniques to change both the children’s and the parental patterns of thinking and behaving
Parenting a Teen Who Has Intense Emotions: DBT Skills to Help Your Teen Navigate Emotional and Behavioral Challenges by Par Harvey and Britt H. Rathbone
The teen years can be daunting for any parent. But if you are the parent of a teen who lashes out or engages in troubling behavior, you may be unsure of how to respond to your child in a compassionate, constructive way. In this important book, two renowned experts in teen mental health offer you evidence-based skills for dealing with your teen’s out-of-control emotions using proven-effective dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT).
Not by Chance: How Parents Boost Their Teen’s Success in and After Treatment by Tim Thayne
Your struggling teenager is going to a residential or wilderness treatment program. Their addictions, learning disabilities, or emotional/behavioral issues have brought you to a moment of decision. Heartsick, anxious, and exhausted, questions bounce endlessly around your mind, “Will this work? Was this really necessary? Will she ever forgive me? Can we handle him at home when the time comes?”
As an owner/therapist of wilderness and residential programs, Thayne was frustrated when young people made monumental progress, only to return home where things quickly unraveled. His mission became to vastly improve long-term success by crafting and proving a model to coach parents on their power to lead out through full engagement during treatment and management of the transition home.
Not by Chance engages readers through solid research, simple exercises, and captivating stories taken from Thayne’s own life and the living rooms of hundreds of American homes. This book serves up concrete tools, hope, confidence, and stamina for families, professionals and mentors.
The Parallel Process: Growing Alongside Your Adolescent or Young Adult in Treatment (Revised & Updated Edition) by Krissy Pozatek
The bestselling The Parallel Process revised and updated new edition contains two new chapters and other valuable insights and information from the author, care providers, and parents integrated throughout the book. It also contains moving and poignant forewords by a care provider and parent. For a parent of a struggling teen or young adult, a mental health treatment program that takes the child out of the home for a period of time offers parents a respite from the daily tumult of negotiations, power-struggles, and unsafe behaviors. However, just as a young person is undergoing self-discovery, skill-development, and learning accountability, parents also need to engage in a similar process can use the crisis of having a child in treatment to reflect on their own patterns that may have contributed to the families’ unraveling. This is The Parallel Process.
How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and How to Listen so Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish
This bestselling classic by internationally acclaimed experts on communication between parents and children includes fresh insights and suggestions, as well as the author’s time-tested methods to solve common problems and build foundations for lasting relationships, including innovative ways to:
· Cope with your child’s negative feelings, such as frustration, anger, and disappointment
· Express your strong feelings without being hurtful
· Engage your child’s willing cooperation
· Set firm limits and maintain goodwill
· Use alternatives to punishment that promote self-discipline
· Understand the difference between helpful and unhelpful praise
· Resolve family conflicts peacefully
Parenting with Love and Logic and Parenting Teens with Love and Logic by Dr. Foster Cline and Jim Fay
A classic parenting philosophy and another series of books that has spawned countless workbooks and psychoeducational classes. This parenting book shows you how to raise self-confident, motivated children who are ready for the real world. Learn how to parent effectively while teaching your children responsibility and growing their character.
Establish healthy control through easy-to-implement steps without anger, threats, nagging, or power struggles.
Parenting Teens with Love and Logic: Preparing Adolescents for Responsible Adulthood
by Dr. Foster Cline and Jim Fay
From the authors of the bestselling Parenting with Love and Logic, this teen-specific resource empowers parents to raise responsible tweens, teens, and young adults without anger, nagging, or power struggles. Learn to set healthy boundaries, encourage important skills, and foster effective decision-making with empathy and grace.
Designed to help you and your child grow during the challenges of the teenage years, this book addresses a wide range of real-life issues such as:
- Addiction
- Social media and screen time
- Peer pressure
- Sex and dating
- Divorce and visitation
- Anger and aggression
- Paying for college
Boundaries: When to say yes, and how to to say no to take control of your life by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend
Written from a Christian perspective, this book (plus workbooks, dvds and many, many subsequent versions targeting specific populations) explores what are boundaries and how to set effective and healthy boundaries which is crucial for feelings of worthiness, empowerment and contentment.
Boundaries Workbook: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life
by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr John Townsend
An essential companion to the bestselling book, Boundaries Workbook provides practical guidance and tools for setting boundaries in the home, workplace, and digital spaces.
Following the latest edition of Boundaries chapter-by-chapter, this official workbook’s interactive exercises are designed to help you further develop healthy boundaries, resolve conflicts, and log your thoughts, progress, and successes along the way.
- Additional readings, examples, and situations.
- Reflection and discussion questions.
- Journaling prompts.
- Biblical wisdom with verse references and prayers.
- Further reading resources.
The 5 Love Languages of Teenagers: The Secret to Loving Teens Effectively by Gary Chapman
Never before has raising teens been so perplexing. If you are wondering what on earth you’re doing wrong, you’re not alone. But there is hope. In this adaptation of the #1 New York Times bestseller The 5 Love Languages® (more than 20 million copies sold), Dr. Gary Chapman explores the world in which teenagers live, explains their developmental changes, and gives tools to help you identify and appropriately communicate in your teen’s love language. By learning to meaningfully express love amid your teens’ many changes, you can stay connected, maintain influence, and help them grow into healthy adults.
Dr. Gary Chapman will help you:
- Understand today’s teenagers
- Identify your teen’s primary love language
- Discover how to best express love to your teen
- Address your teen’s need for independence and responsibility
- Respond with love and wisdom when your teen fails
PODCAST recommendations:
Karyn Purvis Institute for Child Development, The TBRI Podcast: Trust – Based Relational Interventions